Low and behold

Police crackdown on lowrider street racing exposes generational rift among aficionados

Word of the gathering in Framingham spread from car owner to car owner, and Oscar Nuñez decided to attend, driving his low-riding, souped-up 1994 Toyota Supra to the preordained parking lot.

Nuñez, a 30-year-old father of two, said he had no intention of racing on that early spring evening. He just wanted to admire the other cars, he said, and hang out. But when another driver called him out, questioning the power of his little Supra, Nuñez said he found himself at a stop light on Route 9, his foot on the gas pedal, ready to race.

"It was ridiculous," he said. "It was stupid. Now that I think about it, it never should have happened. But in the heat of the moment, my blood was rushing."

Police say the majority of people who get involved in street racing typically drive altered vehicles, like Nuñez's. And so, in an effort to get alleged racers off the road - or at least to scare them into another jurisdiction - some police agencies have increasingly begun enforcing a state law restricting how much motorists can adjust the height of their vehicles.

Citations are up 57 percent in the last three years - from 322 in 2005 to 506 last year, and the 2008 figures are on pace to go even higher. But perhaps more interesting than the citations themselves is how this crackdown has turned lowrider upon lowrider, old generation against new, dividing this chrome-plated, testosterone-infused, often-misunderstood subculture of men - and they are almost always men - into two rival camps.

On the one hand, there are those who consider themselves the true lowriders, people like 67-year-old, cowboy-boot wearing Kelsey Martin. They drive big, old American cars; 1960s-vintage Chevy Impalas are especially coveted. Their owners consider the vehicles pieces of art, with their leather seats wrapped in plastic, shiny wire-spoke wheels spinning on whitewall tires, and suspensions reconfigured to bounce on hydraulics. The goal, says Martin, is cruising.

"Slow and low," he said, "just like me."

Lowriders, first made popular in the 1950s in postwar southern California, were never designed for speed. And that's one big reason why purists have a problem with Nuñez and his generation of car owners, whom Martin calls the "idiot lowriders."

It's bad enough that they drive foreign cars like Hondas and Volkswagens, vehicles dubbed imports, Euros, or tuners. What is worse, according to traditionalists, is that the new crop of low-riding drivers aren't happy just being seen. They want to be fast, too, squaring off in organized street races from Everett to Brockton.

"It's more or less every single person - every single person with a hooked-up car does it," said Lorenzo Alonge, who drives a low-riding 2005 BMW and owns Eastside Motoring, a custom car shop in Waltham. "It's just how often they do it, and where they're stupid enough to do it. That's what it comes down to."

But Charles Costa, a 22-year-old diamond salesman from Salem, said it is unfair to target every low-riding import or blame them for the problems of the low-riding community at large. Just because he drives a low-riding Volkswagen Golf GTI with six 12-inch subwoofers thumping around in what used to be the backseat of his car, Costa said, that doesn't mean he races his car. Nor should it mean, he said, that his car, a 1997 model, is worse than another person's '64 Impala.

But standing next to his copper-orange vehicle one night recently at a car show in the parking lot of the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, Costa, a gold chain dangling from his neck, said he wasn't too concerned about the disrespect from traditional lowriders or about the police.

"They've got to catch you first," he said.

Under state law, motorists cannot modify the height of their vehicles more than 2 inches up or down. But police officers, historically, have been disinclined to handing out such citations.

The fines are relatively low - $35 for a first offense, not more than $75 for a second, and not more than $150 for subsequent violations.

Police say $35 hardly dissuades drivers from lowering their cars. And such citations are also hard to prove in court, said Lieutenant Edward Blake of the Lynn Police Department, where police might have pictures of the vehicle in question but not the vehicle itself.

But in Boston, Springfield, and other communities where street racing is a problem, traffic officers have started taking a more proactive approach to the previously overlooked lowriders, and, in some cases, highriders. The reason, police say, is safety. Sergeant Andrew Klane, who oversees collision reconstruction analysis for the southeast district of the State Police, said some cars have been altered to ride so low that, on impact, their air bags will not deploy.

There are obvious dangers to the drivers, especially when they operate at high speeds. "You get decapitation," said police Captain Frank Armstrong, commanding officer of area E-18 in Hyde Park. And then there are the hazards that some modified cars can pose to others. Instead of paying $1,200 or more for a modified suspension, mechanics say that some drivers, looking to ride low to the ground, simply cut the factory-manufactured springs connected to the car's shocks.

"It's just a matter of saw blades - what saw blades cost at the local Home Depot. They cut the coil and the car drops," said Adam Ayer, an old-school lowrider who owns 4130 Customs car shop in Quincy.

"They're destroying the factory suspension that's been designed to work with the car," Ayer added. "So when you start racing a car that's been mutilated like that, you get accidents."

Never mind the danger that such cars might pose. What troubles the protectors of the lowrider culture is the way the new low-riding generation has changed the rules. A classic lowrider, they say, would never take a power saw to a car's suspension or race. And the fact that the average person, or police officer, sees a dropped-down Civic and a low-riding Impala and assumes they are the part of the same convoy offends many purists. The new generation, they say, aren't even technically "lowriders."

"There are the true lowriders who know how to respect the street and know what you can and cannot do on the street, and then there are the little punks out there who want to show off," said Jaime Galeana, a North Attleboro man who drives a low-riding 1968 Impala convertible and is president of the First Impressions Car Club. "What the young kids don't understand is that the street has to be respected. There are laws."

But to the import crowd, driving their low-riding Hondas or Toyotas, such complaints sound like the criticism that worried members of the establishment have been hurling at lowriders for decades. They say what they are doing to their cars is an art as well, and people should respect that.

"We have two jobs," said Nuñez. "We have families. These vehicles are just a way of representing ourselves."

But sometimes, Nuñez conceded, all this representing can lead to racing, like the race Nuñez participated in on Route 9 in April. It lasted just seconds, Nuñez said, and passed without incident. There was no crash and no police to witness the race. It was just a couple of guys, and their cars, and a chance to see what they had on a straight stretch of pavement.

Nuñez's Supra won. Still, he admits, it was crazy, especially in that fast, little car, riding low to the ground.

"The car, to be honest with you, is really scary."

Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@globe.com.