How LA’s Underground Street Racing Scene and The Fast And The Furious Grew Up

Before the Dodge Chargers were dragging safes through Rio in improbable bank heists, before the orange Toyota Supra, before living your life a quarter-mile at a time, before Dom and Letty and Brian, there was just Stephan Papadakis, his friends, and Los Angeles. Advertisement They weren't interested in bar hopping or clubbing or what everyone else their age was doing. They were interested in cars, deserted streets and going fast. They liked to race, and there wasn't an easier place or time for it than LA in the early 1990s. These were the Rodney King years, when crime, racial tension and police brutality were at a boiling point. Out of that atmosphere, Papadakis would rise to become a legend in drag racing history, shattering front-wheel drive records in his little yellow Hondas, proving that these underestimated tuner cars had real performance potential. Today, Papadakis runs a successful race shop that bears his name, but his ascent into legalized motorsports had beginnings in illegal, underground racing on the darkened streets of Southern California. Indeed, it was a scene that birthed the first of the Fast and Furious movies. Yet like any other scene, it has since grown, and in many ways,… Read full this story

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