Inside Auckland’s ‘most ruthless’ street-racing meet.
By Daniel Brunskill
“Nah, we don’t really do burnouts,” a man in his early twenties sitting in the passenger seat of a Japanese import says. “We mostly just cruise around…”
His voice trails off as it is drowned out by the sound of screeching tyres and the smell of burning rubber. 30+ cars queue up for a turn to shred their tyres in an industrial cul-de-sac in Avondale.
This street car meet started in a carpark outside Greenlane McDonalds over an hour earlier. Almost every weekend 50–100 car enthusiasts park up with their modified street cars, ostensibly to talk cars and then ‘cruise’ the city.
They gather from 10:30pm, shortly after 11 someone will sound their car horn and shout “lets go” across the carpark. Suddenly the carpark becomes manic as everyone heads back to their car and roll out onto the southern motorway.
It takes less than ten minutes for the crowded carpark to empty out, leaving only a handful of late night shoppers parked outside the nearby supermarket. The cacophony of loud exhausts is replaced with an eerie quiet.
Despite aggressive anti-street racing laws being in place for almost a decade, illegal street racing is alive and kicking in Auckland city.
Legislation aimed at cracking down on ‘boy racers’ passed by the National government in 2009, led former Police Minister Anne Tolley to announce in a 2014 press release that illegal street racing offences had reduced by nearly half.
However, police told Newshub in 2016 they had become concerned about a resurgence of illegal street racing and drifting across Auckland.
Former road policing manager for Counties Manukau, Alison Brand said hundreds of cars were congregating in different locations across the city most weekends.
“We can have what they call trains of cars up to 2–300 cars long. They’re travelling potentially hundreds of kilometres in a night,” Insp. Brand said.
The identity of the organisers of these meets is a closely kept secret and even social media surrounding the events is kept in private accounts.
A group of boy racers in Wairarapa were stung earlier this year when police said they raided a property and opened a “Pandora’s Box of raw video evidence” that has been used to impound a dozen vehicles and charge “a number of offenders”.
Senior Sergeant Simon de Wit said, in a press release, that police had no tolerance for street racing.
“Police will continue to do everything we can to clamp down any illegal driving activity, we don’t want drivers on the road who are endangering the lives of people in our communities,” he said.
However, a former-organiser of Auckland car meets, who spoke anonymously, said the street car scene was not intimated by this kind of threat.
“They always try a crackdown, we just find another way,” they said in a Facebook message through the Facebook page ‘Hard parks and cruises Auckland’.
They said the change in laws and increased policing has led to a change in the type of cars being driven at the meets, but the numbers of drivers meeting to “do burnouts and cruising” have remained steady.
“It depends on the night, it could be 40 or 400,” they said. “The biggest I’ve seen is 100+.”
The organiser said they were familiar with the Greenlane car meet, but wasn’t willing to say who organised it nor how the meet was communicated.
Auckland-based car photographer, Beinn Chapple-Law said he had been to the Greenlane meet, but did not know who the organisers were.
“The way I found out about that was someone snapchatted me, I believe that one is organised on a Snapchat group,” he said.
While Chapple-Law is well known within the car enthusiast community, he hit headlines in July for leaning out the boot of a car driving the harbour bridge while shooting a video.
Police threatened him with a $20,000 fine, although Chapple-Law insists he was safely harnessed inside the car and it was “extremely safe”.
This story illustrates his relationship with road rules; he doesn’t mind breaking them but only when he is confident it is safe.
“I don’t really condone drag racing on roads in the city, or drifting. I’ve seen people almost get hurt really badly,” he said. “It is fun to drive over the speed limit, but only when it is safe to do so.”
When he attended the Greenlane car meet last year, he thought the fact it was organised anonymously through Snapchat made it more dangerous than fun.
“They are very unorganised, because its anonymous and no one was really there to take responsibility, everyone just went wild.”
“At the start of last year most of the car meets in Auckland were underground, you had to be in a Facebook group chat or Snapchat group to know about them. They weren’t very publicised, that’s because they are quite ruthless.”
When the Waterview tunnel first opened, but before traffic cameras had been installed, it became a site for ‘roll racing’ drags. A pack of cars would slow down to “almost zero” and allow two cars to drag race through the empty tunnel in front of them.
This ended when speed cameras were installed inside the tunnel, but multiple sources confirmed this type of racing still occurs on other stretches of motorway.
Chapple-Law no longer attends these type of events, and now organises his own high-end street car meets and rallies through his brand The Notorious Collective.
“I’m much more about an organised event with rules set in place, because people can get hurt really bad. At the California meets we’ve seen people get killed even.”
The Notorious Collective host events for ‘car enthusiasts’ not ‘boyracers’.
“Car enthusiasts are a massive group of different kinds of people,” he said. “There are boy racers, but the majority of people are very safe with their driving.”
22 year old, Dean Middleton is one figure in the car enthusiast community who is trying to promote safer more organised car meets.
A reformed boy racer himself, he is now the CEO and Co-founder of a tech start-up called Turnout.
The app is a combination of the Waze driving experience with a community aspect to help people connect with other car enthusiasts and organise meets.
Turnout has just over 13,000 users in NZ and Australia and is launching in the USA later this year. Roughly 7,000 users are in NZ and over 1,000 of them are women.
Middleton said the lack of organisation around car meets is a cause of much of the dangerous behaviour.
“These types of events tend to get out of control relatively quickly,” he said. “Someone starts doing a burnout and someone else jumps in the bandwagon and it just starts to get out of control.”
“Once there is more than 20 people doing one illegal thing, it becomes very hard for you to get caught.”
Turnout CTO and Co-Founder Ilia Sidorenko agreed that trouble starts because of a lack of organisation.
“What we’ve seen a lot is that when an event is not organised well, people get bored and that is when they start doing burnouts and revving their engine and all the stupid stuff.”
According to Sidorenko, a well-run event is much less likely to have illegal activities occur.
The Turnout app is designed to help promote safer, even if not completely legal, events.
“Obviously, if there was no app that stuff [burnouts, street racing, ect] would still happen,” Middleton said. “But the app brings a high level of organisation to that type of event, so it stops people from getting lost and suppresses the idea of ‘hooning’.”
Being able to pre-plan interesting routes for the car meet to drive together means people are less likely to split off to do drags or burnouts, and the in-app instant message system means organisers can take more responsibility for meets and have more control over the drivers taking part.
This approach is backed up in research, one study which interviewed Christchurch street racers, found that “easy accessibility to legal facilities for burn-outs would reduce the incidence of illegal activities” and the attraction to street racing was expressed as “chicks and fast cars” rather than a desire to engage in illegal activity.
A trial in San Diego, which allowed drivers to do informal racing in a local stadium instead of on the streets, estimated that it prevented 53 deaths and 101 serious injuries were prevented, and saved $162,088,000 for the city.
Middleton said dangerous events like the type seen in Christchurch in recent years is why they decided to build out the community side of the product. To “stop that level of boy racing from happening”.
“Most ones that get hosted, especially at Greenlane,” he said. “Get shut down relatively quickly because of what has happened in the past. With people doing burnouts and stuff.”
Back in Avondale, where the Greenlane meet has gathered to do “burnouts and stuff” the event is suddenly interrupted by a series of car horns being sounded.
“That’s the signal to leave,” someone shouts.
It is an early warning system that the police have arrived. The drivers rush to their vehicles, nervous thee police will block the cul-de-sac and force every car through a checkpoint.
Instead the police just ticket a few unlucky drivers and the meet splits off in all different directions.
A few minutes later the cul-de-sac is abandoned again, leaving only skid marks and a front bumper which fell off an old sedan.
NOTE: When contacted about this story, a police-spokesperson said: “Police are not aware of any significant issues in the Greenlane area. However, we encourage any members of the public that might have concerns about dangerous driving to report it to Police on *555.”
