HEADER PHOTOGRAPHY ED AVES
Boy Racers
1.
The term ‘boy racer’ has become synonymous with ‘idiot’. At its heart, this subculture is built around a premise so crude and obvious it hardly needs to be emphasised: the car is an extension of its owner’s masculinity, a surrogate phallus. Boy racers have engendered some of the most ludicrously over-modified vehicles in existence. More is more, they seem to think. All glaring paintjobs, tinted windows, bulging fibreglass, thunderous subwoofers and flashing alloys, these customised contraptions become idealised self-portraits of their owners. Here we have, in mechanical form, how each boy racer wishes to be perceived.
They are not ‘boys’, of course, but men. Young, hedonistic, reckless, and with less-than-zero respect for authority, they take pride in being a nuisance. Boundaries – in terms of law, society and geography – are disregarded. Hierarchy is jealously squabbled over: he who has the fastest, loudest, brashest car is king. What matters most, however, is not the status of the driver, nor even the Frankenstein attraction of a vehicle built from disparate parts – it is the sheer, exhilarating rush of it.
2.
After dark, when the commuters have all gone home and clambered into bed, the streets are empty. This is when the boy racers tend to emerge: low-rent vampires chasing petrol fumes, allergic to the glare of daylight life. Pandering to popular opinion, the media describe boy racers as a nuisance, a menace, a pest. They are portrayed as an urban vermin, to be expunged at any cost. To each other, however, they are brothers in arms.
Fraternal solidarity unites boy racers against a common enemy: the law. This, perhaps, is why an air of romance hovers around them, the outsiderness of fallen angels. For all their self-evident buffoonery – their taste for cars so kitsch they resemble pantomimes on wheels; their pubescent lust for cheap vodka and thudding music – boy racers are unquestionably rebels. And rebels are often heroes.
3.
It isn’t just the cars that are modified; behaviour is too. A code of games and challenges gives shape to the boy racers’ encounters with each other, a tribal language of display and competition. Among the ritual excitements is the ‘doughnut’: pull the handbrake, turn the wheel as far as it will go, and accelerate hard. The cars spin in a tight, screeching circle, revving hard as tails of white smoke rise from the burning rubber. Other activities include the ‘wheelspin’, which makes the rear wheels spin with such futile vigour that they do not push the vehicle forward, merely leave black skid marks on the road.
When they want to relax after a hard nights’ driving, the boy racers park and loiter by their bonnets like a gang of bandits, exchanging insults, swigging drink, chatting with their female admirers. (Girlfriends can seem another accessory to the boy racer image, like alloy wheels or fluffy pink dice in the windshield.) Most of all, however, boy racers like chase each other’s tails down strips of desolate road, their engines running as fast as they can go.
4.
Boy racer meetings (or ‘cruises’, as they like to call them) are carnivals of anxiety and aggression. They usually take place in quiet suburban areas, gatherings of five or more. A cruise is a kind of roaming social club, offering the racers a chance to size up each others’ vehicles and note the latest modifications. Decade-old Ford Fiestas, sourced from the pages of Auto Trader, are dolled up to resemble Subaru Imprezzas.
Travelling in packs, they skirmish round the town from dusk to dawn. Weighed down by passengers, each car’s undercarriage hangs so low they almost scrape the tarmac. Waxed bodyworks slip beneath the amber streetlamps, and reflect the glowing logos of the suburban skyline – Halfords, Exxon Mobil, AquaValet. Subwoofers blend with the drone of dilated exhaust pipes, excited passengers wail and chatter, the gear shift clicks from 3 to 4: another breakneck night is in full swing. Somewhere on the road ahead, a police patrol car is itching to pull them over, a local resident is about to complain about noise, and some poor boy racer – hoping to impress his backseat audience with a daring handbrake turn – will write off his cherished car in a collision with a lamp post.
For the meantime, though, the road is whatever they want it to be.
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