Street racing is probably one of the stupidest things in which a driver of a vehicle can engage, and it should be discouraged to the highest extent of the law. But do we really need a separate law?

In Ontario, the reasoning was that it gives the roadside police officer a lot more discretion in doling out punishment – specifically the right to confiscate the car on the spot – hopefully the embarrassment of having to tell mom or dad that the prized family Mercedes is in some police towing compound will make Junior think twice before dragging the souped up Civic off the line.

I don’t know if it really works that way for kids with more money and testosterone than brains, but that’s the thinking.

And besides, if you commit a crime with a weapon, you don’t get handed the weapon back and told to show up in court on a prescribed date, so charge the guilty street racers with weapons crimes and let them face the corresponding punishment.

Anyhow, racing in a public venue is wrong on many fronts other than just because it’s illegal or you might kill yourself of others (the two are not dependent on each other, witness the recent incident in the Mojave desert where a vehicle in a sanctioned race ploughed into a crowd of spectators who were too close to the action, killing eight and injuring another dozen or so.

Many street racers see racers on TV and decide they can do that and they can’t. First of all, you don’t have a closed course (that means only people who are familiar with and trained on the rules and etiquette of track racing are allowed anywhere near the track). Although the speeds are higher, the track scenario is actually much safer than vehicles on a road travelling at half the same speeds.

First off, all cars are going the same way at relatively the same speed (and many multi-car crashes happen when one car dramatically drops speed for whatever reason). Second of all, there are people waving flags to tell you there’s danger up ahead and give you a bit of advice on where to go to avoid it (on many tracks, you also have people high above the track telling you what’s happening ahead and what action you should take).

The vehicles themselves are safer, with drivers belted in so tight they can barely move their arms to steer the car, and they’re protected by helmets, neck stability devices and fire retardant cloth over all parts of their bodies except the eye sockets in most cases.

And most important, the drivers all have years and years of training, through various sizes and shapes of vehicles, learning the dynamics of car control so they can start taking corrective action before many of us even know there’s a problem developing.

Being in complete control of a car at even 150 km/h is not easy. Race car drivers just make going at speeds twice that seem that way.

Even the slowest among them is far better than anybody who takes to racing on a public stretch of road. Smarter, too.

Tags: street racing