Illegal Street Bike Racing - Modern Outlaws

The air around the two men's heads seems ready to explode. "Motherf*cker, you know you don't deserve to ride that bike," spits Ronnie, rocking back on his heels and stabbing the muggy night air with an indignant finger. "You know what color your stripes are, dog? They f*cking yellow. You a coward. Get yo' ass home before yo' get hurt." There is now a palpable fear that the next retort will be the thunder crack of a 9mm handgun.

It's midnight on a Wednesday night in August in the small town of Forestville, just off the 495, the beltway that encircles Washington D.C. We stand in the parking lot of a neon-lit restaurant called Cranberries. It's an unremarkable modern red brick joint in a strip mall surrounded by the other mundane stores that you see all over America: Burger King, RadioShack, Wal-Mart...

But far from mundane, the parking lot this night is a tangle of exhaust smoke and screaming engines, pulsing with 100 gleaming sportbikes. The riders wear doo-rags and high-end Vanson leathers. T-shirts, with images of murdered rap heroes Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, are worn over the top. Gold-capped grilles glitter in the amber haze of street lights, along with candy-painted tanks and chromed wheels. Many riders have patches on their jackets declaring membership in motorcycle clubs like Baad Boys Sport Riders or the Maryland Rebels.

Many bikes are Suzuki Hayabusas tricked out with LED underlighting, bullet casings set into the brake levers and $5000 custom paint jobs. "I got something for the poh-lice too," says one rider, pressing the button hidden inside the fairing of his GSX-R1000. The license plate at the back snaps up into the tailsection, out of view.

Sharper eyes notice some of the other modifications. Swingarms have been extended, bikes dropped to only a few inches of clearance. Or, as one spectator describes it: "Those bitches dipped right on the ground." And if you look closely, you will see nitrous bottles mounted under the subframes.

Japanese engineers toil to make these bikes carve corners, but the riders here are only interested in one thing: maximum acceleration for blistering 11/44-mile sprints in illegal, late-night street races. And the smack talk and hustle, the acid insults, are all part of the pre-race warm-up. If you insult someone boldly enough, maybe they'll get angry and throw down to race-more often than not when they shouldn't.

Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, illegal motorcycle street racing is huge business. The most popular form is drag racing; it's the purest test of the sheer accelerative power of the machine, and it's usually over before the police show up. Riders become legends through an undergound nexus of contacts. Some travel the country like pool hustlers, setting up races for money, whistling in and out of towns and stripping the uninformed of their mountains of cash. The best of them, guys like "Shine" and Johnny Locklear, operate more like hired gunslingers from the Wild West with secretive, well-funded sponsors backing them. They set up big money races with serious contenders over the Internet for high stakes. Fortunes are won and lost.

As one racer from Philadelphia, who asked not to be named, told us: "It's big money involved, that's for sure. It's fast money, too-tax free from the inner city, know what I mean? These guys aren't Michael Jordan or Donald Trump, but they can afford to lose $40,000 on an illegal motorcycle race. People get rid of dirty money fast; if they need more they just go and make some more." Another unnamed source from South Carolina, the "sport's" hotbed, says: "I've seen guns pulled at street races when guys lose amounts of money that you can buy a house with."

My main contact is "Ronnie," a gap-toothed, blustery dude who stands 6'2" with an arch wit, and now he's cascading insults on a man he thinks he can goad into a race. His prospective opponent, overweight and knock-kneed with a blue bandana, soon stalks back to his glistening white Suzuki Hayabusa, the slurs still ringing in his ears. "Yo! And take that bandana off," Ronnie shouts after him. "You don't deserve to wear that neither." Ronnie winks. "This is how the hustle starts," he says conspiratorially. "I wanna get inside his head before we race."

Soon a deal is struck with a more serious contender in black leathers and a pencil moustache. The money is "locked up." We leave in a convoy, Ronnie with his bike on the back of a trailer pulled by a Jeep. We head deep into the night to a secret location somewhere along Route 4. It turns out to be a spot behind an evangelical church. The last thing on anyone's mind tonight is prayer. Or redemption.

Onlookers weigh each rider's chances, like prizefighters, and bet with each other accordingly in noisy exchanges. The riders check out each other's bikes, Ronnie on a white-and-blue GSXR-1000; the other rides a Kawasaki ZX10. "You better not spray me," spits Ronnie. Spraying is slang for using nitrous oxide, an oxidizing agent that burns fuel faster and increases power by 35 percent. They examine each other's bikes in a bid to detect hidden nitrous bottles that would give an unfair advantage.

Then they discuss the terms of the race. "Gimme three and the break," says Ronnie. This means he gets three bike lengths at the line and leaves first, the other rider reacting to him. They agree, as the other rider has the faster bike and is around 60 pounds lighter than Ronnie. One of Ronnie's cohorts, like a boxing trainer, boosts his confidence. "Dog, when you drop the hammer on that motherf*cker he goin' be sick." Ronnie nods. I start to take pictures when someone whispers to me, "Better put the camera away-you don't know what jokers we got around here who don't want their face seen."

The race set, they head out to a dark, two-lane highway without streetlights. Spectators walk down the roadside to where they can watch. Traffic streams past.

Once the road clears, Ronnie and his adversary taxi into the lane, occasionally turning their heads back to make sure no cars are coming from behind. Then they start to burn their tires, sending thick silver clouds of smoke into the trees at the roadside. Each guns the throttle and jumps the bike up to an imaginary start line. The bikes roar as tachs hover over red lines.

The revs drop sharply and then the bikes thunder off. The noise splits the air with an eardrum-piercing howl as they go up the gear range and eventually out of sight over the brow of the hill, doing 160 mph down a public road that is still carrying people home from bars or to red-eye work shifts. Two of their cohorts are at the makeshift finish line with the wagered money. They act as unofficial marshals. We drift back through the trees to the parking lot, waiting on their return and news of the winner.

But an uninvited guest arrives first. A sheriff's department cruiser has heard the commotion and slides into the parking lot, bathing startled faces in red and blue flashing lights. Panic: People stream in different directions, hurriedly firing up bikes and speeding off into the night. If the police showed up, Ronnie advised me earlier, I should drive his Jeep and trailer to a pre-arranged rendezvous. I act as instructed, crawling slowly past the police. Ronnie's long-since gone.