Is it "drag racing" or
"street racing?"

4/7/03

Dale Wilson is a bracket racing "retiree" who was editor of Bracket Racing USA from 1991 to its demise in 1998. His latest dream is to return to racing in either a front-engine dragster, a slow motorcycle or the family Mazda wagon. Everything else he has is for sale.

hich is it in your hometown newspaper, drag racing or street racing? For us, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution now prefers the words "drag racing" to describe any kind of street racing, especially when there's a wreck and/or loss of life. Such was the case last month when a 61-year-old grandmother was killed by a teenager racing on the street.

The background: Local police charged a 16-year-old girl with homicide in the death of two people, the 61-year-old woman and a 17-year-old passenger in the teenager's BMW. They say the teenager was street racing when her car flipped over a median and landed on top of the grandmother's Honda. The girl was in serious condition as of the news report, dated March 9. The accident happened on a Friday afternoon in Gwinnett County, near Atlanta, at a parkway that police say is known for illegal street racing.

There was no mention of another car involved in the street race.

For the first couple of days after the incident, a writer for the A J-C reported that the 16-year-old girl was "drag racing." Then, in a follow-up to the story, the writer did a profile of the grandmother who was killed in the accident. He referred to the incident as "street racing." The profile was an excellent piece of journalism, revealing that the 61-year-old was one year shy of retiring, that she loved to travel, that she had been on vacation in Destin, Florida, and she was returning home when the wreck occurred, and that she was a devout Catholic, going to church almost daily, on her lunch break.

Street racing. The words and what they connoted hit wife Fran and myself hard. Understand, we live in Atlanta, where NASCAR reigns supreme in the racing world, and drag racing takes a long back seat as far as the local media is concerned. Even though the wide Atlanta area is home to several professional racers -- Warren and Kurt Johnson, Ronnie "the King" Davis, Whit Bazemore (even though he is now from Indianapolis, Atlanta is where he grew up), Reid and Mark Whisnant, and others - they rarely get coverage out of our local papers and radio and TV stations. Atlanta's drag racing past is also rich -- it's where "Dyno Don" Nicholson got his start, along with the Platt brothers, Hubert and Houston, plus Phil Bonner and Dick Brannan, the late Pete Robinson, and many others.

Often, our only source of drag racing news - who won, who's doing what -- is via word of mouth, the Internet, national television, racing publications and USA Today. We live in a vacuum as far as drag racing is concerned.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise when I read the profile on the grandmother and 17-year-old who were killed, which ran on March 11 under the headline, "Vibrant life cut short in crash." Nowhere did it refer to the racing incident as "drag racing." Instead it was "illegal street racing." Sure, I mourned for the lady and the kid, but I also said, "Ah, now we're getting somewhere. No more accusations of hopped-up drag racers tearing up the boulevards and fast and furiously taking lives." Maybe the newspaper will finally get it right.

I was wrong. I e-mailed the reporter who wrote the stories and asked if he would talk to me about the change in emphasis from drag racing to street racing. Specifically, I wanted to know if he or other reporters with the A J-C took their cues from the police, who are prone to call such racing "drag racing" in their reports, or from their editors. And why the change from "drag racing" to "street racing" in the profile?

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