Hundreds of tiny explosions are erupting under the hood of a purple Volkswagen Beetle. It’s 7:51 on a Friday evening, and the growling engine of this old car—and others like it—is providing the soundtrack to the night. A few feet to the left of the Beetle is a black older-model Chevrolet Camaro. In a few seconds, the two cars will tear across the pavement, wheels screaming, as the drivers try to best each other in a drag race. The police are nowhere to be found.
And yet, on this night, that’s not a problem. In fact, law-enforcement agencies encourage this kind of competition in this exact space: the drag strip of World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois, less than 15 minutes from downtown St. Louis. Here, gearheads from across the region have converged to race, drift, and talk shop at Midnight Madness, a legal, sanctioned amateur street-racing event held each month at the track.
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A $25 payment gets drivers unlimited passes on the track or in the drift pit from the time racing begins at 7 p.m. until the flag is waved around 1 a.m. Denny Wess is eager to take his 1979 Pontiac Firebird onto the strip and see what it can do. In the middle of a queue that snakes around the perimeter of the facility, track officials are running through a quick safety inspection of Wess’ ride, verifying his license and insurance, and checking the undercarriage to make sure everything is legal.
“I try to stay away from the street-racing scene,” Wess says as he waits. “When I was younger, the illegal racing did attract me a little bit. But I’m older now. I have kids. I’m trying to set a good example. I just like to come out here and have a good time.”
Organizers at World Wide Technology Raceway are trying to entice not just folks like Wess, but also people who are more tempted than him to race illegally to try competing in a safer, legal environment. For one, it’s a great way to expose people to the facility and encourage them to come back for all of the other programming, from riding go-karts to watching the various National Hot Rod Association, NASCAR, and IndyCar events that fill the calendar. Most importantly, it gets drivers off the street who might otherwise be drawn to the risky, dangerous, and, frankly, annoying illegal racing that’s plagued the city and frustrated residents over the past year.
And while Midnight Madness, now in its seventh year, serves its purpose well, it is only part of the solution to a problem with no easy, time-tested answers. As cities like St. Louis work toward curbing illegal racing and aggressive driving on public streets, it’s going to take a combination of carrots and sticks to determine how much progress is ultimately made.
Looking at the Problem
Speeding has felt ever-present on city streets, but when the COVID-19 pandemic quieted downtown, the problem exploded. Thierry Godard is among the many downtown residents who’ve been forced to deal with the loud, spontaneous takeovers that have become a regular nuisance over the past year. On some level, Godard, a car lover and former automotive journalist, appreciates drivers’ need for speed. But he could also do without motorbikes ripping wheelies on Broadway.
“I’m thinking that there’s a real issue with accessibility to tracks,” Godard says. “Maybe the issue here is not necessarily street racing per se, but what we’ve done to marginalize motorsports. A lot of tracks have been torn down and they’ve put communities or golf courses over them, especially in Southern California. In St. Louis, I’ve seen so many unused or abandoned parking lots that could be utilized.”
Officials at World Wide Technology Raceway have tried staging events like Midnight Madness more often but found that the higher frequency didn’t bring in more drivers. It simply split the number of drivers who were already showing up. But perhaps if additional, similar events were offered at different locations, it might encourage more drivers to take notice.
Part of the draw to illegal street racing is that it is illegal, and the element of risk is fundamental to its appeal. That raises the question that has been difficult to answer not just in St. Louis but across the world: How do you sell a legal street race as a cool alternative?
World Wide Technology Raceway markets the Midnight Madness events through its social media channels. Every so often, when a story involving illegal racing makes the news, John Bisci, the track’s director of media relations, says he tries to remind local media outlets to let viewers and readers know that there is a safe place to race located just across the river. Marketing something like Midnight Madness, though, can be a challenge. It draws a couple hundred drivers, give or take, each month, Bisci says, and that’s great. Putting merely a small dent in the ranks of illegal racers should be considered a victory. The challenge is getting even more people to believe that it’s still cool and fun to race responsibly at a legal, sanctioned track.
“The thrill of doing something illegal is never going to go away,” Bisci says. “We can’t beat that. We try as hard as we can, and we make the track available. But there’s still a certain percentage of people who just want to do it on the street because it’s thrilling and sexy. You might get caught. You might get hurt. That small percentage of people who want to do it because it’s illegal and it’s thrilling, we can’t stop them. But we want them to know there is a safe place to do it.”
Dr. Evelyn Vingilis, a professor in the department of family medicine at Western University in Ontario, has spent decades researching street racing and the behavior patterns of drivers who participate. In one academic paper, she and a co-author examined possible interventions for street racing, including ad campaigns, driver education, legislation and enforcement, and changes in car design. Vingilis found that public relations and education don’t work. Legal interventions, such as police blitzes and tough penalties, can serve as effective deterrents, but those are short-term stopgaps, not big-picture solutions. A single blitz might be effective one night, but police departments can’t blitz every night—especially when they’re already struggling with staffing issues. St. Louis police are out patrolling downtown streets, but this certainly isn’t the only issue they face. Preventing every race, particularly those that are spontaneous, isn’t possible.
A radical answer could be reducing the power of street-legal cars, many of which are, as she notes, sold as fast, exciting machines. The use of governors and monitoring devices could also be a way to get drivers to slow down. Of course, getting widespread buy-in on such extreme modifications to car design and performance feels unlikely. Even if this would be the most effective approach, the answer probably lies elsewhere.
The Role of Urban Design
What if instead of arresting drivers and modifying cars, we considered the urban areas these drivers are racing through? That could mean narrowing streets, reducing lanes, introducing more green spaces—think pocket parks—and generally making a place like downtown St. Louis less inviting to racers and more inviting to pedestrians. The temporary concrete barriers the city has installed to calm traffic and create one-way streets could become planters, sculptures, even outdoor seating for restaurants. It might, in fact, be easier to obtain grants and donations to build things like mini parks and planters than it would be to tackle street racing more directly.
The “Slow City” concept, which emphasizes accessibility rather than mobility, has caught on in European cities including Paris and Helsinki. Closer to home, it’s worth considering whether the time is ripe to embrace such an idea. As cities have emerged from the depths of the pandemic, we’ve already seen countless urban areas reimagined to make them more habitable for diners, cyclists, and walkers. It seems that this would work in St. Louis, too, given the popularity of things like carless days in Tower Grove Park, the increased options for outdoor dining, and a number of upcoming projects that will give cyclists more room on main city thoroughfares.
“Our cities in North America were, from the very beginning, built for cars,” Vingilis says. “European cities, on the other hand, evolved organically from the city center being old. You have small streets, and you can’t really get cars into those downtown corridors. If you go to some place like Seville in Spain, it’s all walkable. It programs people and makes it normative to think about a slower city life, where you can sit down at an outdoor café and you can feel safe to do that.”
The way a city is designed tells you how to use it. In a way, the wide swaths of concrete in downtown St. Louis are telling racers that the city is theirs to use. Reorienting the neighborhood away from the cars that drive through it and instead designing it for the people who live and work there might make it harder for cars to pick up speed. It might just encourage street racers to find safer spaces, like the one across the river.
