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Starting in the early 30's (after prohibition when a bunch of former bootleggers had their supped up cars and nothing to do with them), with a few peeks in the 50's, 70's and 90's.
personally I think it is the fault of a few things.
1. complexity of newer cars making them harder to sup up.
2. Hobby has been taken over by the wealthy who can afford to upgrade already fast high end German and Italian sports cars driving out the purists who would either build a muscle car from scratch out of junkyard parts or supping up their moms old hand me down Honda civic.
3. stiffer penalties if caught, (gone are the days of a $50 ticket if caught now you pretty much have to take out a loan).
4. urban sprawl, (can't just meet up 2 miles outside of city limits anymore, you have to go further and further outside of town to find a place to race).
5. Other forms of recreation, (many of the people I personally knew from the street racing culture years ago are into offroading in jeeps, lifted 4x4 trucks & SUV's now, for the reasons stated above).
While there has always been an offroad/4x4 culture I think the main reason it has grown so much in the last 10 years if because it has absorbed many refugees from the hot-rod/street racing culture.
Killed street racing culture ?! Lol...there is plenty still going around the country. Real street racing , not the stupid Street Outlaws stuff. Sure , now that many tracks offer a "grudge" night it does pull some of it off the street but its still going on. There are dozens of FB pages, youtube videos etc. to prove it.
I think complexity is definitely a huge one. Another being that supping up your civic won't mean much when you come up against a $60k Hellcat or $100k GTR/Tesla, meaning production cars are so fast and prevalent that there's little street racers can do on a budget vs the amazing and ubiquitous sports cars in production.
What fun is it to spend tons of hours plus the sweat and finding parts etc, to get wrecked by some random guy that picked up a Hellcat that morning and just mashed the pedal?
I'm not Tesla guy, but the P100D, stock, borderline needs a roll cage to run in NHRA. Gonna take a lot of money and know-how to beat that in an Altima.
When the Police Radio Technology became faster than the cars, things slowed down, as is now the addition of video / camera locations.
More cars will soon be 'implanted' with GPS / Black box reporting directly to your insurance company, but the jalopy crowd will escape until full compliance is mandated. Watch for this in CA, then it will spread to CARB states and finally USA wide.
There is now a lower % of really young drivers, as many now wait until they can afford insurance.
Some are too busy 'gaming' to bother with a car.
Some do not want the risk,
others can't get their hands dirty.
(different 'culture' of fix-it / tinkerers)
Raised age of drinking has probably reduced street racing impulse, impairment, and imperilment
+/-
Last edited by StealthRabbit; 01-30-2019 at 09:13 AM..
I don't think the younger generations have much interest in cars. Their interests are in computers and video games. A lot of kids think they should live well without ever doing any work and maintaining a car is hard greasy work.
The newer cars are difficult to work on, requiring expensive tools.
Location: Formerly Pleasanton Ca, now in Marietta Ga
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SWFL_Native
When street racers started killing innocent people uninvolved with their shenanigans.
That’s why we have tracks and drags.
Eventually those will dissappear. In Sacramento a longtime drag track puts up with neighbors who complain about the noise trying to shut it down. Of course that drag strip has been there many years and the people built houses knowing it was there already
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