It’s a slow night at the Big Kmart parking lot on 67th Avenue and Bell Road in Glendale. Normally at this hour on a Saturday night, on the sprawling square of asphalt shared between the Kmart, Chuck E. Cheese and the Mixteca restaurant, the action is hopping. Local car clubs show up to show off their custom rides; there’s always live music on the Mixteca patio and a DJ spinning salsa in the parking lot, where street tacos are served up for $1.75. As the weekend evenings wear on, you’ll inevitably see a few street racers show up to organize a meet for an impromptu race, then systematically file out to the nearest industrial park. With a noticeably more caliente flavor, Kmart/Mixteca is the west side’s answer to Scottsdale’s Pavilions.
But on this hot August night, there’s only a trio of hood-raised Hondas and a couple contingents of small-block Chevys and modified Fords spread out over the parking lot.
Darryl and Denise Patullo both drive classic Camaros, lovingly restored by Darryl in his garage. Don’t ask what’s under the hoods though, because you won’t get a straight answer. Photo by Erica Odello
“It could be the heat,” says Darryl Patullo, owner of the AZ Kart Werx go-kart shop in west Phoenix and a former drag-car engine builder, who’ll occasionally hit the lot with his own ‘69 Camaro alongside his wife’s ‘67.
“I would say in September, these guys will start coming out more. I know that some of the cars I build just run too hot during the summer months.”
Or it could be that the serious street racers are simply blowing off the hot parking lot meet to organize a race over Facebook Messenger.
“Anyone out and about tonight?” posts the owner of a pumpkin-orange turbo-charged Mustang GT on the Facebook page of AZ Street Outlaws, a Phoenix-based group of high-performance car owners with more than 5,000 members who often use the page to issue public call-outs for a race.
“Just stopped by the usual spot on my way home; there’s a couple dozen muscle,” fires back a Trans Am driver who goes by the screen name CrazyElf. “Nothing fast yet.”
Metal muscle matches once organized at Saturday night car shows and in clandestine convenience-store parking lots are now set up over smartphones, in the form of private text messages sent to friendly archrivals or public call-outs issued over Twitter or Facebook.
“Making a call-out for (two popular opponents) to run for $500,” posts a tow-truck operator and Mustang racer on AZ Street Outlaws’ Facebook newsfeed. “Looking for both parties to respond and come to terms.”
Taking the negotiations from the parking lot to the cloud may seem, at first, like a good way to evade the local police. But as it turns out, they’re all over it.
“Oh yeah,” laughs Phoenix Police Sgt. Steve Martos. “Those are details that I wouldn’t want to give up officially, because if we start telling people how we track them, they’ll choose a different mode. But we use, I guess you could say, a variety of investigative techniques to determine where these events occur, and we use a number of tools to be able to stop them safely.”
On social media, it goes, no one really knows if you’re a cop—a known issue the administrators on AZ Street Outlaws have ongoing fun with, sometimes directing suspicious newbies to nonactive action spots as a test.
“I don’t think you guys understand,” confided one, after a call-out to a nonexistent race on 35th Avenue and Buckeye Road created some confusion.
“If you alert the ‘polizei’ to one area, you can be in another area doing your thing with no ‘polizei’ around.”
But Martos says the anonymity of the Web—paired with the racers’ compulsion to post Instagram rearview mirror pics and quick dashboard Vine videos of their street-racing “kills” as soon as they happen—has worked to the advantage of the city’s anti-street racing squad.
“The racers will hook up on social media and race in one location then say, ‘OK, let’s race over here,’” says Martos, who adds that lately the remote stretches of roads in the southwest Valley have seen the most action. “They’ll bounce around. But let’s just say we have our techniques for monitoring that.”
Need for Speed
Rick Watters is in the business of souping up cars to make them go extra fast. His Glendale shop, Rick Watters Racing, has built or re-machined engines for dozens of professional NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) dragsters, and he’s also built some engines for street-legal Mustangs and Camaros that can do a quarter-mile track in less than nine seconds—faster than even a $400,000 Lamborghini Aventador.
But even Watters has trouble explaining why any customer who’s not a pro racer will spend tens of thousands of dollars to give their cars that much horsepower—particularly since, as of the 2012 closing of Speedworld Raceway Park in the far Northwest Valley, there’s now only one track in the Phoenix area, Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park (formerly Firebird International Raceway) in Chandler, where drivers of high-performance cars can race legally.
“A lot of people build stuff just to be building it,” says the 53-year-old V8 fan, who did his own share of racing in NHRA events up until the early ‘90s and now helps guys mostly his age (his best customers are men age 40 to 65, he says) turn their stock Corvettes into legitimate 1,000-horsepower midlife crisis killers.
“They spend a lot of time and money working on a race car, but how often do they actually ride it? It’s kind of like motorcycle owners. Everybody wants to own a Harley. But how many of them do you see with more than 5,000 miles on them?”
The car show on 67th Avenue and Bell Road in Glendale, which happens every Friday and Saturday night, welcomes all-comers. It is not uncommon to see a souped-up Honda Civic parked next to a pristine ’57 Chevy with a brand-new Audi R8 driving by, looking for a parking spot. While most people attend to show off their cars, street racers use the event as a starting point for their weekend’s activities. Photo by Erica Odello
Those who do dare to take their supercharged cars out on the city streets to satisfy their need for speed can be in for some harsh penalties if caught. According to Arizona’s Racing Statute, a first-time offender caught drag racing on the streets can be sentenced to jail time and a minimum fine of $250; a second offense becomes a Class 6 felony, doubles the fine and requires at least 10 days in jail plus a one-year license revocation.
“There was a guy we knew who had a pro-charger on a BMW, and he got stopped on the SR-51 going 160 miles an hour,” Watters says. “Some of this is a little craziness. They threw him in jail and impounded his car.”
Hit another car and, if you survive, the lawyers can be even more punishing than the cops. “Nowadays the liabilities for getting caught street racing are atrocious,” he adds. “It’s not like in the old days, where guys would go rope off a street and race, and everybody accepted their own liabilities and responsibilities. Now there are so many lawyers to go chasing after you if anything happens.”
If you’re cocky enough to presume you’re too clever to get caught, good luck even finding a decent abandoned stretch of highway anywhere around the crowded Valley to race on. Sgt. Jay O’Neill of the Glendale Police Department says the city’s street-racing problem—serious enough in 2005 to prompt the creation of a special street-racing task force dubbed the Bell Road Fast and Furious Project—has all but disappeared, thanks simply to all the traffic that now runs through a revitalized Arrowhead.
“The organized racing that we saw a lot of 10 years ago has gone away,” he says. “I’d like to think it had something to do with enforcement, and we did a lot of media back then, to help get the word out. But really, it’s just become too developed up there. With all the restaurants and the bars and everything, there’s just too much traffic. Even at 2 o’clock in the morning. It’s not as wide open as it was 10 years ago. You can’t get a quarter-mile stretch of roadway without an SUV on it.”
So why spend a fortune on horsepower you’ll likely never have the opportunity—or the guts—to fully use? Watters says a lot of it might have to do with the way cars are marketed today.
“You can buy a Z06 Corvette now—without any modifications, straight from General Motors—that has 515 horsepower,” he says. “You can order a Mustang with 600 and a Cobra with over 600. And now Chrysler just came out with the new Hellcat Challenger with 707! That’s the highest horsepowered American-made vehicle you can buy. A 10-second car, right off the factory floor.”
Joe Cordes, who runs Cordes Performance Racing in Mesa, one of the most respected shops among Valley street racers, says he gets a lot of customers looking to get their cars up to an even sweeter spot.
“In the half-mile race events, you’re really not competitive unless you’re making over 1,000 horsepower,” he says. “We can take a new C7 Corvette to 1,000, easily.”
Cordes says a lot of the cars he works on are actually shipped out of state, to pro drivers who run on NHRA tracks in California, Nevada and other locales with more active circuits. But he’ll also do cars for the average Joes commuting on the 101 who simply want to “pump up the power and make their car a little more fun.”
“What they do with all that big power after you do the build,” he adds, cautiously, “is up to them.”
Insta-brag
If you can’t find a Phoenix street to race all that heavy-metal thunder on, you can always show it off on Facebook.
All over the Facebook feeds and online discussion forums of local street-racing groups (besides AZ Street Outlaws, there’s also Arizona’s Fastest Street Cars, AZ Street Scene, AZ Street Heat DELUXE and others), pics and videos abound of outrageous car mods, jaw-dropping stunts and impromptu races. While you’ll hardly ever see a selfie of the racers themselves (paranoia is rampant), there’s plenty of the automotive equivalent: the rearview mirror pic of the hapless opponent left eating the dust of the winner, who’s somehow able to snap his cellphone camera at the end of a high-speed sprint.
Cordes Performance Racing in Mesa builds many high-horsepower street-legal vehicles for customers. This Camaro is posted on their Facebook page with the caption “Making Blake’s Camaro Crazy(er)” along with a series of photos of the modifications added to the already impressive engine.
Social media has given street racers an immediate bragging space for their exploits, complete with all the good-natured trash-talking and juvenile taunting previously reserved for the finish line. It’s a fittingly high-tech twist on an outlaw sport that has evolved to include hit reality TV shows like Discovery’s “Street Outlaws,” new methods of tuning that can be done entirely on laptops and highly technical engine building that could almost be called artisan.
“The days of building an engine in your garage and going out street racing are a thing of the past,” says Darryl Patullo, who admits to doing a lot of street racing during his younger years in Colorado, where his team was “untouchable,” he claims. “Now they’re having professionally built engines—we’re talking $20,000 to $40,000 motors—and they’re going out and betting some real money against each other. There are guys who make their living doing that.”
Patullo himself is content running his successful full-service go-kart business, which keeps him connected with the racing community in Phoenix. “Some of the guys who race big cars, they’ll use the go-karts for conditioning,” he says. “You can get a couple of g’s out of a go-kart, if you’re running it hard.”
But he confesses that once he finishes work on his big block Camaro, he just might be coaxed to taking it for a spin on the streets.
Rick Watters of Rick Watters Racing Engines takes a break from wrenching on an engine that shipped out and competed at the NHRA races in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Aug. 27. Photo by Erica Odello
“I’ll probably hit the drag strip occasionally, but with all of the safety equipment that is needed at the track, that might keep me away from there,” he says, echoing a common complaint about the take-it-to-the-track argument that keeps many strapped street racers from going legit: many will spend all their cash on the cool essentials like nitrous, turbochargers and engine swaps but skip the heavy-duty seat belts, roll cages and other pricey safety gear required to race at the track. “So I may just take it to the street and cruise it a little bit.”
For all the high-tech updates that street racing’s gone through, Patullo says he still likes the old-school ways of making it happen.
“If we find a race on the street, it’s on,” he says. “Get out a ways from people, put some money down and let’s run ‘em. I don’t know what the other driver’s got; he doesn’t know what I’ve got. Let’s just run it and hope that we brought enough!”