Thought this thread died!?!?!?!:?::?:
Anyway, if none of you guys went to "Moparts.com", streetracing in the late60s/early 70s in NYC was amazing & kinda weird. The personalities were at least as big as the car's reputation & in an age where P/S was the epitome' of doorslammers you had guys imitating & experimenting with surprisingly stock stuff & getting it to go pretty fast.
Power-adders & forced-induction was still pretty rare so you had NA cars trying to go faster based on cubic inches. 500 cu. ins. was a HUGE motor back then and there really weren't as many big-block cars around as people imagine. Oh they were out there. But those guys were well known & were given space to race amongst themselves. Now depending on the caliber of your car, you'd go to the local cruise spot or road & you'd have no problem setting up a race usually from around $25 bucks to a couple of hundred. The high-dollar runs were pre-arranged & you'd often have to know someone associated with the cars to be let in on the betting or the race location. Occassionally you'd get a high-dollar race spontaneously but then its location would be somewhere other than where the bet took place. Often around the backside of JFK airport. There & many of the roads we used you wouldn't think of using now as the areas are waaaay too beat-up or crowded but back then, around 2,3,4, A.M. you could get away with it.
Where I usually hung out, the (World's Fair) Marina guys would meet there, go up (the roads were all overpasses) on the VanWyck Expressway, Cross Island Pkwy or Connecting Hwy & run. That way (in our minds) it would show if a car was really streetable & not some racecar with license plates thrown on it. Did that happen & were cars really towed in to race? Definitely! But these were more the high-dollar races than the average hotrodder. Joe Oldham's book is really accurate & HMM did a couple of good articles on NYC streetracing several years ago. Each Borough (county) had its own "heroes" & fast cars & shops & racing spots but IMO the fastest cars were usually from Brooklyn or Queens. It wasn't uncommon to see a "name" car being towed in or a "name racer running on the street. Of course you were foreever dodging the police but the smart guys would have scanners & blocking cars so as to insure the race would go off. Some maintain the cops got paid off & in some cases I wouldn't doubt it, but during those times the police had much bigger issues than streetracing so we didn't worry a whole lot about it....
