Style & Speed

Recently it’s been a rough ride for Miami’s street racers. A string of bad accidents resulted in eight deaths since 2001 in Miami-Dade and Broward. That, in turn, led to a new state law that makes drag racing a crime; in fact just watching a race is now illegal. The situation was aggravated this past June when seventeen-year-old William Lacasse, Jr., wrapped his 1999 Corvette around a Miami utility pole. His dad blamed his kid’s death on the locally filmed 2 Fast 2 Furious. State and local police are vowing more crackdowns. For street racers all this means mad heat.

Which is why, on a recent Thursday night, Shorty Guerrero is furious about a guy in a ’94 Mustang who’s just burned rubber and peeled out of a strip mall in Westchester, clipping a kid in the process. The kid goes down hard, but he’s alive and moving as the Mustang takes off down Bird Road. “Those are the kinds of assholes that make it hard on the rest of us to do what we like,” Shorty fumes. “People doing stupid shit — peeling out with others around, racing in the middle of main streets with traffic.” Or in this case, a parking lot swarming with street racers, their cars, and more than 200 onlookers. “We don’t need that and we don’t all do that,” he goes on, “but if you got a hooked-up car, cops think you’re running and gonna kill somebody.”

Shorty, nineteen years old, is the leader of 305SR, one of Miami’s four dozen organized car clubs. (SR=street racing.) Yes, he’s physically short (about five-six), but in all other ways he lives large. Mature way beyond his years, he gives off a kind of cool, calm confidence mixed with a charisma that’s part politician, part Jay Leno. Chin always up, quick with a quip. His dark hair is neatly trimmed, his standard uniform a white undershirt over a pair of khakis. On this night a plastic employee badge dangles from his belt. He’s just gotten off work at Circuit City, where he sells computers and electronic gadgets.

Around him in the parking lot, between a Denny’s and an Office Depot, are lines of highly customized cars — tight whips — of all kinds: slammed low-riders, ferocious sports cars, high-tech Hollywood Hondas. Hordes of 21st-century rebels without a cause, decked out in baggy pants and silver chains instead of leather jackets, stand and stare at the cars and also at the flocks of teenage girls who self-consciously strut around in skimpy halter tops and hip-hugging capris.

Missing from the crowd, though, is Shorty’s posse. He’s here by himself. That’s because 305SR has been steering clear of popular street-racer hangouts, usually shopping center parking lots in West Miami-Dade like this one. (Their foresight pays off. A week later nineteen people will be arrested here. The charge: trespassing.)

Shorty rolls out to catch up with his crew at a prearranged location. Heading south on 87th Avenue, he stops in the middle of the road. It’s a little after eleven. No cars. “Sometimes I raise my windows, turn off the radio, and just listen to my car … listen,” he says softly. Then he stomps on the gas; the engine howls a strained va-r-r-r-o-o-o-m and rips into a high-end squeal. In a matter of seconds he’s doing 90 mph.

“It’s a beautiful sound,” Shorty grins as he shifts back down below speed limit. He approaches a major intersection and spots a Miami-Dade cop, a “polo,” in the oncoming lane. His tricked-out RAV4 cautiously moves through the intersection at a steady 45 mph. The patrol car busts a U-turn. Although the right lane is free, the cop tails Shorty in the left lane for a mile from Bird Road to Coral Way.

Shorty nervously bites his nails and peeks up at the rear-view, but other than that he’s chill. “When a cop has nothing better to do, and I pass one in my flashy ride, what do you think they’ll do?” he asks rhetorically. The answer is in his squinting eyes: They follow him. “I’m an easy target,” he grumbles.

At a nearly empty parking lot on Coral Way and 87th, Shorty turns in and pulls up to a group of twelve guys — all with hot wheels, all 305SR, all there after checking www.305SR.com for the meeting place. (Shorty created the Website a couple of years ago. Access to the message boards requires registration, and 235 users are logged in.) The club has an active core of roughly twenty senior members, guys like Boost, Nory, Lou, and Taker. Nearly all these car aficionados are Hispanic — Cubans, Nicas, Boricuas — between 18 and 21. Most live in Southwest Miami-Dade, from Kendall to “Kutla’ Ridge.”

Boost, a heavyset photographer in his early twenties, has been racing since he was fifteen, in whatever he could get keys to drive. These days he lives at home with his family so almost all the money he makes can be poured into his souped-up 1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T. Thousands on upgrades and modifications. He also pays more than $6000 a year in insurance and fills his tank three times a week.

Twenty-year-old Nory, a self-taught mechanic, says street racing isn’t just for light, technologically efficient imports like Honda Civics and Mitsubishi Eclipses, two of the most popular makes. American cars known for their incredible horsepower and torque can be menacing threats to someone driving “rice” — overdone Japanese cars.

The reality is you can make any car fast; all you need is money and ingenuity. Nory and Lou drive bear-looking “sleepers,” 1994 Chevrolet Caprice SS models, which have the same engine as a ’92 Corvette, “big-man’s power.” They’ve turned their rides into cop cars that jet to 120 mph in less than ten seconds. The transformation began with a laptop computer they used to reprogram a computer chip that limited the engines’ rpms. Under the hood, Nory’s Caprice reveals a menacing engine laced with silicone hosing and a tank of nitrous oxide, frozen air. Nory calls that the “ultimate modification,” and jokes about racers who’ll sneak into hospitals to nab nitrous tanks. Don’t understand the value of cold air? Nory explains: “Fuel is converted to gas — air. Cool air is denser, so more of it can be injected into the engine than hot, expanded air. More air, more fuel, more power.” Other ways to boost power: Disconnect the A/C, the radio, even the power steering, which isn’t a problem at hyperspeed but makes parallel parking a bitch.

But Shorty and others stress that it isn’t all about horsepower and racing. Shorty himself isn’t a racer, though he does care about performance — otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to install a T3 Super 60 Turbo kit with a front-mount intercooler. For Shorty and lots of other car aficionados lumped in with racers like rappers are with thugs, it’s about looks and style. His satisfaction comes from turning heads when he rolls by, “breaking necks.”

Shorty’s 2001 Toyota RAV4 is a terrestrial space shuttle — all clean white with gray trim, illuminated by a soft blue glow inside and out. The NASA aesthetic extends to his sound system, which can thunder like a shuttle launch thanks to quads with a custom speaker box that houses three Pioneer twelve-inch super woofers. At only half blast your chest feels like it’s about to cave. And the interior boasts four 5.6-inch DVD screens — one on the dashboard, one on the back of each headrest, one inside the trunk.

But the sleek aura of Shorty’s ride is quickly eclipsed by what’s playing on his screens — the latest Girls Gone Wild video. This car club loves eye candy, both metal and flesh. Even their Website has two pages of booby pics. Tits and ass, though, are big with all car clubs. “Cars and girls go together,” Shorty says matter-of-factly. “It’s what you pick up with. The car is an extension of your dick, but the guys with the biggest motors have the smallest dicks!”

Intriguing stuff, but back at the Office Depot parking lot, where Shorty has returned, there still hasn’t been a race, it’s close to midnight, and the cops will probably show any minute. Some cars rev up, looking for a response that would signal a challenge. Nothing. Then suddenly a large group rolls out at the same time in the same direction. A race!

Everyone drives slowly, trying to avoid attracting attention on the way to a side street bordering Tropical Park. Once there, some drive into positions that block the north section of road. At least a quarter-mile of clear track is opened for a late-model Honda Accord and Knight Rider 1997 Camaro: black body, black rims, and practically black tints.

There’s no wait. They drop the hammer. The engines sound like machine guns as they rocket away. A girl standing in the crowd loudly shrieks (someone stepped on her foot for a better view) and all eyes turn her way. By the time they look back it’s over. Who won? Who knows? Who cares?

The crowd splits before the cops come. Shorty just shrugs. “Bro, you know I wouldn’t race even if I wanted to,” he says. “If something happened, my brother would kill me. He’s a cop.”