Did You Hear the One about the Polish Street Racer?

Did You Hear the One about the Polish Street Racer?

Did You Hear the One about the Polish Street Racer?


The New
York Times’ Nicholas Kulish
recently visited Lodz, Poland, a city that has gained a reputation as the Amsterdam of street racing. Until recently, Lodz (pronounced
“Woodge”) was best known as the birthplace of makeup magnate Max Factor. With a recent rise in personal wealth, Lodz’s roads (pronounced “Roodge”?) suddenly became overrun by Polish boy racers who tricked out their Fiats (and DB9s)
to emulate The Fast and the Furious. Fatalities mounted while perfectly drivable Volkswagens lost their transmissions. Something had to be done!

Rather than reinforce the outlaw culture of street racing by, well, outlawing it, officials in Lodz chose a different tactic: They legalized it.

The decided to hold officially sanctioned races once a year. The events proved so popular that the city government invested $20,000 in timing equipment, and Lodz embraced its reputation as the car capital of Poland by hosting monthly races that draw crowds of more than 70,000.

The Lodz technique is not without precedent. In fact, it’s classic “harm reduction:” a public health strategy originally focused on drug abuse. It recognizes that certain people will always engage in dangerous behaviors, and tries to minimize the damage of that behavior. Needle exchange programs, safe sex education, and the designated driver campaign are all examples of harm reduction. Inevitably, critics contend that harm reduction is either “soft on crime,” encourages bad behavior, or is just plain ineffective. Lodz officials counter those arguments with statistics showing that illegal street racing has declined nearly 90 percent since the advent of the sanctioned races. Those are some pretty compelling numbers.

Undaunted by statistics, Autopia decided to check out the
Lodz car scene for ourselves. But rather than convert our US Peso Grandes into Euros, we visited via YouTube. In this video, a mighty Gallardo’s V10 screams, “For God’s sake, you don’t drift a
Lamborghini!” in textbook Polish. In another, a couple of Nissans screech through a school zone sideways.

While Lodz’s drivers seem to be having fun, it’s doubtful that such a pragmatic approach to controlling the dangers of revving engines and raging testosterone could ever gain traction in the US. The closest thing to sanctioned racing this side of the Atlantic is “Racers
Against Street Racing,” a race-track funded coalition that is so cool, its website even says how cool it is to race on a track and not on the street.

Even without its image problem, legalized street racing probably won’t take off any time soon. No mayor would ever want to attract the potential liabilities of turning his or her town into a real-life Need for Speed, and environmentalists would cry foul. Your turn: Would sanctioned drag racing in a US city encourage unsafe activity? Or, would it fail by taking all the joy out of an event that’s only fun because it’s illegal?

Photo by Flickr user Rickydavid