The Vegas Strip

No, not the one with the casinos -- the one that holds the open-to-all drag racing blowout called Midnight Mayhem

By Richard Hoffer

Drag racing fans root for the older cars, whose owners have put the most time into what's under the hood (if there is one). Robert Beck

Midnight mayhem actually begins at 10 p.m., and its violence is generally limited to blown engines and dropped transmissions -- although a Porsche 911 once spontaneously combusted in the parking lot, to the delight of everyone but its owner. Otherwise, the spectacle of amateur drag racing on a pro-groomed strip is exactly what it sounds like: a mad, loud, brutish assault on land speed records, insofar as spidery Honda CRXs and lumbering Escalades can be tweaked toward 12-second quarter miles.

It happens every other Friday night just north of Las Vegas, at an elevation sufficient for the teens who line up in their Supras and Mustangs at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway to look out at the other Strip in the desert, a twinkling neon avenue where the top speed -- this is so sad -- can't be more than 20 mph. The teens (not everyone is an adolescent, actually; some middle-aged couples wait in Corvettes, reliving a rather strange date night) idle in a 400-vehicle promenade of horsepower, everything from old-school muscle cars to feather-light imports.

Soon enough, though, they're signaled two at a time to the starting line. The light drops green, their tires squeal, and they're off into the night -- 80, 90, 130 mph, disappearing down the strip in a warp-speed effect. Then they get back in the growling line of cars and do it again, and again, until the track closes at 2 a.m.

Even for Vegas, which reinvents itself seasonally, Midnight Mayhem is an upstart tradition. This is only its third year. It began when the ever-entrepreneurial folks at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which has more than a dozen tracks, including the drag strip and a 1.5-mile superspeedway, were thinking about new ways to keep their facility lit. Those folks make their nut with one NASCAR event every March; kids paying $10 a pop to use the drag strip (fans pay $5 to watch) are hardly going to swamp the till. Mostly it occurred to Speedway officials that here was this wonderful venue, yet kids were turning industrial parking lots and fresh-paved suburban straightaways into the far deadlier set of The Fast and the Furious.

When those officials floated the idea of institutionalizing illegal street racing, there was some resistance from the racers. The fun of it, for at least some, is that it's illegal. The explosive growth of Las Vegas, which has created hard-to-police desert thoroughfares, makes for one of the biggest street-racing cultures in the country. And at least some of its appeal is its scant regard for minimum ages and maximum speeds.

It is nothing, say Las Vegas Metro police officers, for 1,200 cars to materialize at a Terrible Herbst gas station, then just as quickly disperse and regroup on the beltway or some eight-lane strip somewhere else under the Nevada moonlight. According to Juddi Lin, who was a mainstay at these events until she cracked up her car and got $1,300 in fines, it was just like the movies: racing six abreast sometimes, as much as $5,000 on the line when wildly illegal eight-second race cars appear, then scattering into the night air when the troopers arrive. "It's crazy," Lin says. "The street racers end up off-roading for hours, driving along railroad tracks to get away. Except the cops have helicopters."

Police sergeant Keith Bowers says the city has been lucky, with only one death it can attribute to street racing. (San Diego has had 16.) But that low number can't hold as the problem continues to grow. When a street race draws 3,000 people -- with strippers performing and bartenders serving -- it is impossible to police, even when it can be located. "We couldn't even get to the races," Bowers says. "They'd just block the way."

Midnight Mayhem, for Lin and the 400 other racers who show up on Friday nights, is better, safer and much cheaper (especially after the city passed an ordinance in March authorizing fines up to $1,000 for spectators at illegal street races). The drivers simply show up, beginning at 9 p.m. (there is a safety check, and an inspection to determine whether the car is street legal), choose an opponent if they wish, peel out and get in line.

They don't even need to make their times public; many cars are suspiciously chalked N/T (no time), which indicates that Midnight Mayhem may not have replaced illegal street racing as much as it has become a preliminary for it. "We can't kid ourselves," says Highway Patrol trooper Angie Wolff.

It is, in any case, a fascinating assembly. On any given race night you will see a wide variety of wheeled transportation adapted to sprints yet still capable of milk runs: everything from Mom's minivan (not so many) to a yellow Dodge Viper (not so many) and every kind of import and muscle car in between (mostly these). Some are almost show cars, humming in their ghostly queue, their undercarriages lit by green neon. Many more are simply heaps of almost indeterminate badge, primer-coated, crusted with Bondo, hoods missing, but throttling at a sound level indicating that more care has been taken with the moving parts. As Speedway spokesman John Bisci points out, "You sometimes have to make a choice, do you want to look good or go fast?"

The fans who gather for these events, as many as 2,500, enjoy a kind of underage club (no alcohol served, though there is a DJ and other ancillary attractions) and clearly favor the more plebeian rides. The poor fellow with the yellow Dodge Viper seems to arouse the underdog spirit beyond all proportion to his enviable means. The fans gather at the rail and howl in satisfaction when he's inevitably beaten by an import that sounds like a chain saw. "They hate the yellow Viper," Bisci says. "Hate it."

It is much easier to cheer old Chevelles, deceptive Dodge compacts, little Civics. Even pickup trucks. Two diesels square off and, depleting the ozone layer and national oil reserves alike, chug away under a cloud of black smoke. Two Escalades, one burdened with an arena-strength sound system, the other with seven flat video screens inside, pair up. (Audio wins; it was turbocharged.) Much more popular is the gray-primered 1970 Camaro with the license propped up on the dashboard. Goes pretty good, too.

A new white Supra, though, feels too store-bought to appeal to this crowd. The driver squirrels it around in the water box (show-off!), revs menacingly at the light and then, right at the green, seizes up, dead. This is not the only Las Vegas strip joint where a rear end has gone out on a Friday night, but it's probably the only one where the event draws a two-minute standing ovation. "Bringing your mama's car to the strip," sighs the public address announcer. "Sounds good, looks good...." The crowd goes wild.

And so it goes, into the wee hours, the fumes of so much acceleration forming a petroleum mist over the track, the whining buzz of four-cylinders underscoring the throatier roar of V-8s. They just keep going, two by two, as fast as they can.

Issue date: May 17, 2004