Dream Cruise: What Are We Doing?

2000 Woodward Dream Cruise PT Cruiser precruise night

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2002 Woodward Dream Cruise (8/16/2002)

This is an enormous undertaking, this Woodward Dream Cruise, this free circus up and down Woodward Avenue between Detroit and Pontiac on a Saturday night in the middle of August. Hundreds of merchants all along the route through Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge and Huntington Woods and Royal Oak and and Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, and up and down the side roads in Berkley, Clawson and Troy, count on this weekend as the biggest of their summer. I give it three years before it becomes the Pepsi Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise presented by Rolex and brought to you by XM Radio.

Merchants who have nothing to sell to the million-strong crowd of onlookers and participants, the storm door companies and drapery stores, rent parking spaces instead at ten bucks a crack. Everybody in greater Detroit with any kind of food service trailer finds a spot somewhere along the route to dispense everything from popcorn to tacos and thousands of gallons of soda pop and lemonade. The cops are out by the hundreds. All the Detroit manufacturers have hospitality tents or rented restaurants and condos, and fleets of one-offs and prototypes on display to show everyone how cool and hip and happening they all are. If you don’t have a T-shirt with some kind of car on it, please go away.

Fun though it may be, colorful as it is, and overwhelming in its size and scope, the Woodward Dream Cruise has become just another commercial enterprise like the Michigan 500 NASCAR race 75 miles west of here or a Tigers-Yankees game at Comerica Park, a few miles further south on Woodward Avenue.

Real cruising

Cruising Woodward Avenue, a teenage and college-kid practice that goes back to the late 1950s in Detroit, was about street racing, a practice that was as illegal then as it is now. You cruised up and down the street and in and out of the drive-ins until you found the car you wanted to race, propositioned the guy, and then went out and raced him from stoplight to stoplight under the intense glare of the old yellow street lamps and your peers.

It was not about malts and burgers and conviviality and lining up dates for Saturday night. It was not about cruising along for three hours at 15 miles an hour with 100,000 other cars in molasses-slow traffic, driving through puddles of puked antifreeze from a ’53 Chevy and taking no chances. It was about street racing.

Street racing on Woodward Avenue was what got this thing shut down in the first place, 30 years ago, and why it took so long for all the communities along Woodward, and their police departments, to let it start up again, one weekend a year.

Kids whose fathers were senior executives at Dodge and Plymouth and Pontiac and Chevrolet and Ford and the rest showed up in early summer with this year’s hottest car, and in late summer with next year’s hottest car, loaned for the evening by beneficent dads who probably didn’t want to know what happened next.

The rich kids raced against other rich kids in new cars and the poor kids whose cars were older, many of which were faster than the stock Detroit hot rods, having been massaged continuously for a couple of years.

With the major intersections located a mile apart, the kids could reach speeds well in excess of 100 miles an hour on the huge boulevard with its grassy, tree-lined median strip. It was easy to turn off, run and hide if the cops were after you, and easier still to turn around and have another go at the same kid or a different kid in a different direction if the cops weren’t after you.

There were so many diners and restaurants and fast-food places up and down Woodward Avenue back then that the more deliberate racers could make one pass northbound, line up six or seven races ten minutes apart, and easily make each one of his appointments.

Substantial sums of money were wagered on the outcomes of these races, night after night, summer after summer, both by the racers themselves and by the crowds who chased them at close range or waited for them to fly by, up and down The Avenue. This was where you showed off your hardware, your quick reactions when the light turned green, your clutching, shifting and driving skills, and your balls. Just how many times on any given night would you risk your father’s car, your license, a budding relationship, and the ire of your parents?

Radical change

When the factories started building more and more powerful cars starting in 1960, the whole Woodward Avenue thing changed radically. The professional mechanical engineers who were in charge of developing the Dodges, Plymouths, Fords and Chevys with their 426- to 460 cubic-inch racing engines and heavy-duty suspensions gradually replaced some of the kids, racing each other for the greater glory of the factory and the newest, hottest product. The factories were proving the drag racing prowess of their big-engined prototypes right there on Woodward Avenue as well as Detroit Dragway and Motor City Dragway and Ubly and Lapeer, which were not open on weeknights, cost money to enter, and were far away. Besides, drag-strip racing was legal, and this wasn’t, providing that little extra edge to the proceedings.

On any summer weeknight, you’d see hundreds of gleaming cars playing cat and mouse on The Avenue, clusters of bedenimed teens with their heads all stuck under the same hood in the drive-ins, guys changing spark plugs or adding oil between races, and gorgeous girls just waiting for the quickest, fastest, handsomest guys to pull up next to them. On Woodward, it seemed, parents, rules and regulations didn’t seem to exist. Run whatcha brung, then go home.

Woodward Avenue was close to work for the young engineers, and on it beat the pulse of horsepower-hungry American youth who turned out to race against each other as well as the factory cars. This was market research, racing against and talking to their future customers, as well as a fulcrum for spontaneous word-of-mouth advertising. “Did you see that? That 421 Pontiac just got royally smoked by that Barracuda! What the hell’s IN that thing?”

People got hurt, occasionally. People got arrested, frequently. Cars with more power than brakes or handling got bent, occasionally.

The engines got bigger and more powerful every summer, and every manufacturer in town had a fistful of quick, fast, loud V-8 cars to offer, even the more staid divisions like Oldsmobile and Buick and Mercury. Even American Motors, for crying out loud! Two four-barrels! Three two-barrels! Giant camshafts! Fresh-air induction! Hood scoops! Fiberglass hoods! Aluminum fenders! Slick tires! It was nuts.

This continuous escalation in street racing and drag racing led directly to the introduction of a whole new professional class in drag racing when the tube-framed-flip-top, fiberglass-bodied race car, burning alcohol and nitromethane fuel, the funny car, was born, in 1965.

Still of the night

Much of the very serious factory and amateur street racing took place long after most of the kids were home in their nice, suburban beds. At one or two o’clock in the morning at locations far from Woodward Avenue where there were no cops and no spectators, there was the most serious kind of street racing. Interstate 696, which runs from Lake St. Clair on the east side of the city to West Bloomfield on the west side, between 10 Mile Road and 11 Mile Road, was under construction for years, and for many of those years, the racers used the brand new concrete of the unfinished freeway to race on.

The nascent Interstate 696 crossed Woodward Avenue, so it was easy to get to. The traction was excellent, the late night air was cool and dense, making more power in the engines, there was no cross traffic, and since the road wasn’t open yet, there were no cops. It was simply a matter of removing a few barriers, leaving lots of dense black stripes on the virgin concrete until a winner was determined, and replacing the barriers when they were done. It was the pinnacle of street racing in America, and it all started on Woodward Avenue.

(Yes, we know there was street racing on Van Nuys Boulevard in Los Angeles, on West Chester Pike outside Philadelphia, on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, all over the back-roads of the Carolinas, in Miami, and hundreds of other places, but none of those streets ever made it into a national advertising campaign for a hot Detroit car like Woodward Avenue did for the Pontiac GTO, and none of them was anywhere near a factory racing department.)

So, please, let us remember that the Woodward Dream Cruise is not a celebration of outstanding Fifties car design. It is not an unmuffled paean to rock ’n ’roll oldies, poodle skirts and pegged pants. It has absolutely nothing to do with Vipers and GT40s and 2004 GTOs from Australia. An orderly procession is everything Woodward Avenue wasn’t about.

It’s about the celebration of vintage horsepower and the ability to get that power through the tires and onto the pavement, launching, driving and shifting so well that the guy in the other lane has no chance. It’s about racing and racers, burnouts and wheelies. Knights errant jousting in the same direction every time the green light blinks until honor is won — or the sheriff shows up with his seneschals to stop the tournament.