American Dream: 2 Fast 2 Real
Text and photos by Ro McGonegal
9/14/06
Greg Filipkowski was born in Poland. When he was 12, his family came to America and settled in Long Island, New York. Hearing him tell it, he assimilated a vast and diverse culture as second-nature, surely like he’d been an American boy in another life. Greg’s brother’s friends were hip to the street car scene. They took him to Edison Avenue.
Edison’s been a street-racing venue for years, an inviting strip of asphalt bordered by a cemetery on one side and a mountain of a landfill on the other, the perfect urban dichotomy. Unless you are a street racer or a devotee of Big Purple (a sprawling adult entertainment center nearby), it’s not a popular destination on the what-to-do-and-see-in-Long Island repertoire. After dark and on the weekends, civilian traffic is light.
What sticks in Greg’s head about that virgin visit to Edison is a run between a 1000cc bike and a yellow Corvette sucking nitrous oxide. The Corvette beat the bike. It changed Greg’s world forever. That was in 1988.
When he was old enough, he bought a Mustang sedan and hopped it up. He got nailed racing on a public road and the state pulled his ticket for a year. He got to keep the Mustang. When his time was up, Greg got right back in the saddle and began wreaking havoc. His car ran 12.0’s at venerable Westhampton Raceway. Greg loved the rush. Westhampton got closed down.
All the while, he was in film school and would bring his camera to the street races to document his buddy Charlie and his friends. Soon, they were offering Greg $20 per tape, and they wanted more of them for their friends and relatives. He gave a copy to Ernie at legendary S-K Speed (Lindenhurst), very quickly struck a deal for a hundred tapes at $20
“It’s still a losing investment. It’s like a car,” said Greg with perfect English and southern Long Island inflection. “All the money I make goes into the next movie, to make it better than the one before.”
But he began to see something other than the camaraderie and the racers thorough his viewfinder. He saw a powerful tool, one that needed the power of the press to generate it. He knew he could use his recordings as a plea to the state to build a legal dragstrip somewhere “out east.” That remains to be seen.