Read Motorworld for Free Online Page B

classic-car scene out there as carworkers past and present feel the need to restore and pamper great cars from the days when their city was great too. They meet up at weekends with their customised, power-packed Chevvies and Fords and discuss each other’s sometimes spectacular beards over a Bud or two.
    They even have their own radio station called Honey which is run from the back of a four-wheel-drive truck. It simply turns up at the meeting and plays a selection of good old rock and roll.
    I’ll tell you this. Wandering around a car park full of hot Mustangs and lowered Vettes on a hot summer’s night with Bob Seger belting out of a couple of hundred car radios takes some beating.
    What beat it was what happened when AJ’s Lounge and Eaterie closed. These guys didn’t simply get into their cars and go home. No, they got in, eased out onto the road alongside each other, waiting for the lights to go green and had a race.
    All over suburban Detroit every summer weekend every straight bit of road echoes to the sound of supercharged V8s doing full-bore standing quarters.
    Big money changes hands. Bets of up to a thousand dollars are not unknown as the cars line up… on the public roads.
    You can barely see through the haze of tyre smoke as El Camino pickups roar off the line at full revs. Wilbur and Myrtle can only stare in open-mouthed wonderment as their puny little Honda finds itself sandwiched between a lime-green Dodge Charger and an egg-yellow Plymouth Super Bird.
    This is as subtle as a Big Mac, as restrained as a can of Coke and as American as both. Big cars, big engines, big people and big beards, racing each other over a quarter of a mile straightaway.
    These guys spit at Ferraris and laugh at Lotus Elans. They are not interested in a car’s ability to handle the bends on a switchback mountain pass. They don’t care about pinball-sharp steering or five-valve technology.
    They’d drink a pint of warm beer before they’d own up to a fondness for European and Japanese engines that rev to 8000 rpm.
    They like their V8s big and lazy and their rear tyres massive. American street racing is straight down the line and simple. It’s a national characteristic. The only thing in the world less complex than a blue-collar American is wood.
    One guy watched a bright-blue Camaro launch itself off the line with its front tyres a foot in the air, then turned to me grinning and said, ‘Chevrolets and apple pie, baby, Chevrolets and apple pie.’
    It didn’t make sense but I knew exactly what he meant. This was heartland America.
    And the cops were not about to make waves, partly because they need the support of the white middle classes. A patrol car sat for an hour in a side street watching the action before moving in.
    Over the car’s public address system he announced that the show was over and that ‘anyone on the street in ten minutes is going to jail’. It would have been terribly authoritarian and effective except for one thing. I couldsee through the tyre smoke and the flashing lights that the guy was grinning.
    He knew that he was witnessing what the people of Detroit have been doing for 50 years.
    In the sixties, manufacturers used to bring secret new cars down to these meets and race them against the home-tuned opposition. Many remember Ford rolling up one night in the early seventies with some kind of Mustang which blew everyone into the weeds. It became the Mach 1.
    It’s stories like this which set Detroit apart. It doesn’t matter where you turn, there is always a reminder that you are in The Motor City.
    There’s a comic book sold locally where all the heroes are cars. Take a stroll round the Detroit Institute of Arts which, amazingly, still exists downtown, and you’ll note that every single exhibit was paid for and is funded by the car industry.
    The poets in Detroit write about cars and within a twenty-mile radius of the city-centre grand prix track there are five drag strips. Ben Hamper, a local boy