From The VIBE Vault: ‘Racer X’ (The ‘Fast & Furious’ Inspiration)
Rafael Estevez leads a new generation of fearless young racers burning up New York’s streets and racetracks in their tricked-out Japanese compacts. – By Kenneth Li (May 1998)
At dusk, they take over the road. Roaring and buzzing like locusts, the swarm of asphalt-scraping Japanese cars — with swooping rear wings and brightly colored logos — merges from the side streets of Uptown Manhattan onto the traffic-congested Henry Hudson Parkway. Zigzagging back and forth like jet-fueled go-carts, they slow to a stop, blocking off three lanes of oncoming cars in preparation for the infamous mile-long run.
A black Nissan 300ZX and a white Mitsubishi Starion pull out of the pack and creep up to the starting line. As the sun dances on the nearby river, the sound of honking horns and screaming drivers is drowned out by the sonic blast of the two engines revving for takeoff. A stocky Latino dude in a blinding yellow shirt stands in the middle of the highway and raises his hands. Both cars lurch and halt like chained pit bulls, their wheels spitting out black smoke. The hands drop.
10 mph: Off the starting line, the Nissan pulls ahead by one car length.
40 mph: Still in first gear, the driver jams the stick into second, and his head snaps back. The tires let out a brief squeal.
100 mph: The Starion pulls closer. There’s a halting moment when it looks like the Nissan might lose. It lasts about one hundredth of a second.
160 mph: Gritting his teeth, the man behind the wheel of the Nissan begins to shake from the speed; his vision is a blur. He doesn’t see the Starion closing in.
“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else. Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”
Crossing the finish line, the Nissan driver, Rafael Estevez, wins by one car length. In less than a minute, the guy in the Mitsubishi has lost $7,500. Glowing with confidence, Estevez immediately challenges him for $2,500 and offers an 18-car lead and beats him again.
Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights, is considered an OG among a growing legion of young speed junkies terrorizing the back alleys, highways, and legal racetracks around New York City. The urban dragracing frenzy was started in the early ‘90s by a tightly-knit crew of Asian-American boys in Southern California and is now hitting hard on the East Coast. The hundreds of kids who line New York hot spots like Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens or the Fountain Avenue strip in Brooklyn every weekend are an urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.
Young men have been fascinated with tweaking and tuning big block Chevys and Mustangs since the days of Rebel Without a Cause. But the new guys wouldn’t be caught dead driving the gaudy muscular beasts of yesteryear. Instead, they’re tricking out low-buck Japanese imports like Honda Civics and Acura Integras and tattooing them like skateboards with Neuspeed and Greddy car parts stickers. By stroking the engine, adding a supercharger, and hitting the “juice” (nitrous oxide: a gaseous liquid once used to boost bomber planes in WWII), they can smoke the herb in the Iroc at the stoplight. And to do it with a puny four-cylinder rice burner that your moms would drive is downright arrogant.
Read the full article here: From The VIBE Vault: ‘Racer X’ (The ‘Fast & Furious’ Inspiration)
Rafael Estevez leads a new generation of fearless young racers burning up New York’s streets and racetracks in their tricked-out Japanese compacts. – By Kenneth Li (May 1998)
At dusk, they take over the road. Roaring and buzzing like locusts, the swarm of asphalt-scraping Japanese cars — with swooping rear wings and brightly colored logos — merges from the side streets of Uptown Manhattan onto the traffic-congested Henry Hudson Parkway. Zigzagging back and forth like jet-fueled go-carts, they slow to a stop, blocking off three lanes of oncoming cars in preparation for the infamous mile-long run.
A black Nissan 300ZX and a white Mitsubishi Starion pull out of the pack and creep up to the starting line. As the sun dances on the nearby river, the sound of honking horns and screaming drivers is drowned out by the sonic blast of the two engines revving for takeoff. A stocky Latino dude in a blinding yellow shirt stands in the middle of the highway and raises his hands. Both cars lurch and halt like chained pit bulls, their wheels spitting out black smoke. The hands drop.
10 mph: Off the starting line, the Nissan pulls ahead by one car length.
40 mph: Still in first gear, the driver jams the stick into second, and his head snaps back. The tires let out a brief squeal.
100 mph: The Starion pulls closer. There’s a halting moment when it looks like the Nissan might lose. It lasts about one hundredth of a second.
160 mph: Gritting his teeth, the man behind the wheel of the Nissan begins to shake from the speed; his vision is a blur. He doesn’t see the Starion closing in.
“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else. Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”
Crossing the finish line, the Nissan driver, Rafael Estevez, wins by one car length. In less than a minute, the guy in the Mitsubishi has lost $7,500. Glowing with confidence, Estevez immediately challenges him for $2,500 and offers an 18-car lead and beats him again.
Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights, is considered an OG among a growing legion of young speed junkies terrorizing the back alleys, highways, and legal racetracks around New York City. The urban dragracing frenzy was started in the early ‘90s by a tightly-knit crew of Asian-American boys in Southern California and is now hitting hard on the East Coast. The hundreds of kids who line New York hot spots like Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens or the Fountain Avenue strip in Brooklyn every weekend are an urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.
Young men have been fascinated with tweaking and tuning big block Chevys and Mustangs since the days of Rebel Without a Cause. But the new guys wouldn’t be caught dead driving the gaudy muscular beasts of yesteryear. Instead, they’re tricking out low-buck Japanese imports like Honda Civics and Acura Integras and tattooing them like skateboards with Neuspeed and Greddy car parts stickers. By stroking the engine, adding a supercharger, and hitting the “juice” (nitrous oxide: a gaseous liquid once used to boost bomber planes in WWII), they can smoke the herb in the Iroc at the stoplight. And to do it with a puny four-cylinder rice burner that your moms would drive is downright arrogant.
Read the full article here: From The VIBE Vault: ‘Racer X’ (The ‘Fast & Furious’ Inspiration)