Street-Racing Stupidity.(NEWS)(Honda Motor Company Ltd.)

Byline: Corey Farley

Whispering toward Sacra-mento the other day at 70 mph, I was rocked by a Honda Accord passing at 110. That's a guess. He was going a lot faster than I was, though.

I held my course. If you're going to be a chicane, be a predictable one. A blink later, a Subaru WRX slammed past and pulled away after the Honda.

I'm not without sin in the area of street racing, but I'm going to cast a stone anyway. There's a difference between haring your Mazda Miata down a mountain after a tuner Honda Civic and doing a triple-digit slalom through traffic. The first is reasonably safe fun. The second can be suicide, which, in a vacuum, I'd say is up to the participants.

Often, though, the innocent get jammed up with the guilty, as when an alleged racer killed two members of the Tongan royal family near San Francisco in 2006.

Street racing isn't new. One of the first stories I did for a magazine, back in 19-aught-74, was on a group of racers near Los Angeles. But they ran at night, on a remote road, and made at least a token attempt to keep civilians clear. ("I can't stop you, sir, but there are going to be two cars coming by here awfully fast . . .)

That's not the case now. I see races day and night, in traffic from sparse to near gridlock, ...