Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128140
age. They will be heading off at around 11 p.m. in a confusing melee of dangerous aggression and unbridled street machismo. The result is pure havoc. As the pack heads east on Venice toward La Brea, the rice-burners are being screamed in random stand-offs. One rider throws down the gauntlet to another by simply pulling alongside and bouncing his machine off the revlimiter, and at the next light the pair of them will fix on each other in an iridium eyeballing competition, all the while blipping their throttles. When the light changes, the two scream away in a tumultuous miasma of overrev oblivion, and so on it goes. Crossing Venice Boulevard and running into Hollywood, there are close to a hundred machines drag racing off every set of lights. Even Rampart would have trouble burying this lot. Between 40 and 250 bikes will end up at Carneys hamburger stand on Sunset Boulevard on any given night. There is a moderately sized group of black guys who meet at Starbucks next to Magic Johnson's T.G.1. Fridays restaurant on Saturday or Sunday, whilst on Wednesday they meet up with everyone else on Venice. There is no segregation problem these guys love riding bikes, so any racial boundaries inflicted on society do not apply here. Basically, these guys are just having fun, being a little naughty and hoping for a fracas every now and then so they can become street legends for a week. The street scene is also comprised of people from all walks of life - blue to white collar. The quarter-milers are a different breed. They are the real deal - hardcore with a point to prove and greenbacks to earn. These cats don't operate for chump change - thousands of bucks may change hands in a night, and when things get heavy or a cat wins when he's not supposed to, they often find themselves staring down the barrel of a Glock. Real street racers will quarter-mite for money, no doubt, and this involves big engines, long swingarms, turbos and nitrous - usually attached to a ZX-12R or a Hayabusa - and a fierce launch technique. Nothing much else can hang with these bad boys once they've been heated up. Suzuki Hayabusa conversions are claimed to be pumping out somewhere around 350 hp - without the need for nitrous. Stock rods on the Suzuki are apparently good to 400 hp and drag bikes have been pushed beyond 500 hp - but for the street, the ultimate level of exploitable power available right now is 350 hp. After talking to Daryl, a dreadlocked, self-confessed brazen quarter-miter in downtown L.A. a couple of weeks ago, something became You meet the nicest people In Hollywood.•• abundantly clear. Firstly, the swingarm on his bronze and polished ally Hayabusa was very long; secondly, that made his bike look low, rude and nasty; and thirdly, racing is becoming more and more difficult for these leather-clad duelers who choose plastic and ally as their weapons of choice. As L.A. spreads outward like an unbearable self-righteous cancer, the net of legality is cast ever tighter, and favorite old haunts like those near the LAX airport (Pershing, Manchester Parkway - both of which are big, wide, long stretches) are becoming harder to work with. "If you wanna play hard, you've got to keep your ear well and truly glued to the ground," Daryl confides. "I mean the three of us," he gestures grandly to his extended-swingarmpacking buddies, and also representing Honda and Kawasaki. "We used to be able to do this a lot more - we'd be out all the time puttin' it down, but now we gotta be a lot more careful a little bit clever." Not too careful, though, as anyone with a 250-hp-plus motorcycle will tell you, out-running the cops ain't that difficult. For the not-so-serious and for those who just want a little more beef in their canyon-racing portfolio, the most popular engine mods this year are unsurprisingly for Yamaha R1 s, Suzuki GSX-R 1OOOs and Honda RC51 s. These days, most shops will try to guide people onto track days and into racing instead of back to the street from whence they just came. Jay is a veteran of the street-racing scene and has a viciously buffed, turbo Katana with a 1400cc engine. "Often these things work like an '80s warehouse party in the UK," he states with an urgent, gravelly tone. "A rumor will spread around and you'll have to follow a paper trait of phone numbers ending with one that you call on the night of the race. When you finally get through, you are told a location." Only, in this case, it is going to be a ravenous stretch of rubber-hungry asphalt in Holiywood, not a muddy field full of cow dung somewhere in Buckinghamshire. I have to ask Jay if he ever feels the need to pack heat. "Shit can go down, man. I won't lie to you - we race for two or three thousand dollars sometimes and, if a motherf* * * * * think he been done wrong ... " his voice trails off, "If a motherf***** think he been done wrong then I'd feel stupid for not taking out a little extra insurance cover." L.A. is a gun town. This is the cold, hard reality of the streets. To find out that many racers feel the need for protection is no big surprise. It was about a week after I'd begun camping out at Saticoy. There had been a pregnant cloud over the area for two or more days. These blocks had been getting a lot of attention from the cops due to a couple of shootings, and the vibrations of the place were dark and tangible - I could feel something was going to happen: we all could. The quarter-miters had been coming there for two nights in a row and only a week before, when the kids had been screaming their plastic-wrapped, Japanese race wagons up and down, the night had ended in a fatal incident. The high-revving shootout began just before midnight. 1 had heard the bikes warming up, and then soon after my ears were greeted by the sound of tortured transverse fours wailing as their rear tires scrabbled on the wom tarmac for traction. After the second run, there was uncharacteristic silence. Then we heard the gunshot. Seconds later, a bike screamed off and then we heard another gunshot. By the time we got outside, the pulsating disco inferno of the cops was bouncing light off all the buildings up the street and it was then we heard the third and final shot. It was the worst kind of ending for a street race gone bad. CN The Billiard Inn (below) is a popular meeting place for the nocturnal sportblke crowd•.. ...and Carneys (above) Is where they all seem to end up as the night drags on. eye •• n e _ S • FEBRUARY 6, 2002 23