Everyone’s Mom and Dad has told them at some point not to go street racing, or cruising, or whatever. And while we all got away with it most of the time, there were those times where the cops called home because you just got arrested while out cruising. Or you had to call them because your junk was broke down somewhere. Or worst case, you wadded it up somewhere you weren’t supposed to be. My parents got the call from the cops, the calls from me, and gave plenty of “be careful!” from Mom when she knew we were going out street racing. The big thing for me was that my parents knew it. Hell my dad went with us a lot. But, when we did both go Mom would tell us before we left that we better not both get arrested because she wasn’t coming to bail us out.
We all had friends though that weren’t supposed to go somewhere or do something, or Mom and Dad told them it wasn’t a good idea, and then they ended up tearing up their car, getting in a fight, arrested or worse.
What is the worst thing that happened to you or your car when you didn’t listen to Mom and Dad?
They always told me to stay away from Airport Road, which had a reputation of guys street racing in that area. I did a neutral slam in my freshly painted ’67 Camaro. This resulted in stripped ring gear teeth, which locked up the rear, which busted the rear u-joint & the exhaust. I called my Dad, to call a tow-truck but he didn’t & showed up with his ’68 Chevy pick-up & a chain instead. He wouldn’t listen about the locked up rear & proceeded to smoke the tires on his old truck & severely chip my brand new paint-job, when he tried to pull my Camaro. This happened in ’86 and we still have the truck & the Camaro.
You do not have enough memory on your server(s) or the rest of the internet for me to list the things that I did which were the opposite of what was suggested to me. It has brought me loads of “experiences” but many of them were totally useless wastes of time and my money if I could only have trusted that people knew what they were talking about.
I owned 17 cars by the time I was 20. My driver’s license was suspended (drove anyway), which makes it difficult for a mechanic to maintain employment, despite the number of ASE certifications one maintains. While other pals were out partying, I was in the shop on Saturdays and Sundays, maintaining my junkers.
It never did. My Dad didn’t want my brother and I racing on the street, and told us if we wanted to race he’d take us to the track , help us tune our cars, etc. So the second season we raced, he helped us buy a brand new Super Stock, 426 max wedge Dodge, and off we went, on through the Chrysler boycott of pro stock. Niether of us has ever raced on the street, to this day…now, he never did say, don’t drive fast, just don’t race….
Mum used to tell us to be careful (we still stir her up with imitations of her saying that to this day..) nut she got me out of trouble on a number of occasions – I once had an L34 Torana (Aussie limited build car to homogolate for Bathurst racing – lightweight 4 door with flares, 308 cu V8, 4 speed – went hard, handled brilliantly) – anyway, there was this stretch of road heading back to my place at the time, 68 mph speed limit (110 kph) and I was winding my car out as you do…doing about 125 mph and I went past a cop car (6 cyl Valiant) which had no real chance of catching me but must have got my plate… anyway, got home, opened the back gates, put the car away, jumped into bed (this was about 1 AM) – sure enough, a few minutes later, bang bang bang on the front door…my mum goes to the door (I’m hiding in bed) and has a red hot go at these cops – how dare they bang on the door at 1 in the morning etc. Cops have heard it all before, insist on seeing the car. Mum told me after that the cop popped the hood and put his hand straight on the extractors and burned the crap out of his hand – he wanted to prove it had just been running. Mum came back with – I’ve just gone to the garage (at 1 AM in her nightie) to buy some milk…cop had no choice but to nurse his burnt hand and leave her to it. I thought she was my hero – until she marched into my bedroom and give me a clip around the ear!
Was my grandfather’s Intrepid, a brand new ’98. He had just gotten home from a heart attack, so he wasn’t too keen on running around with me while I was on my learner’s permit. He allowed me to go teach my drum lesson at the church like normal. However, once it was over, instead of coming right back home, I ducked out to a Burger King for a quick bite. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I got drilled in the driver’s side rear door by a Honda CRX who was hauling major ass. Practically totalled the car. I’m sure I didn’t help Grandpa’s recovery, being brought back in a cop car an hour and a half late in handcuffs because I was beating the holy hell out of the Honda guy. Only got away with a “failure to yield” ticket and kept my permit, and did a better job picking out that car’s replacement.
Have you ever backed into your driveway after a night of Street Racing and out running the Law to find them sitting in your drive and turned their lights on! They were pretty decent about it really, they just told me they knew it was me and they’d catch me some day and they did, as it turned out I couldn’t out run the Radios!
I had a 55 Plymouth and my cousin had a 56 Ford. Both cars would out run everything but the gas station. Of course both out daddies told us that they weren’t gonna bail us out if we got caught racing.
We were in town one Saturday afternoon hanging out with our friends and everyone got to wondering who was fastest. We’d raced everyone in three counties but never each other. So we figured we’d find out who was fastest.
We lined them up downtown on the main drag and found out. It was the local police.
Ended up going into the Air Force to get out of the charges.