II

The driving force behind the Showdown was Brian Olatunji, a professional drag racer who attended middle school just a few blocks from City Airport and French Road. Olatunji grew up in a drag racing family. His grandfather John Broaden was the first African-American venue manager in drag racing, overseeing the Motor City Dragway beginning in 1971. Broaden later managed Detroit Dragway with his wife, Marguerite, until the late 1980s, and young Olatunji spent every Saturday night in spring, summer, and fall at the dragway known popularly as “the Dirty D,” which drew crowds of 3,000 to 5,000 each weekend. Family photo albums are crammed with pictures of drag racing luminaries like Connie Kalitta, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney, and Roger Lindamood, while young Olatunji read and collected magazines like Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, Car Craft, NHRA National Dragster, and Drag Review. “Those were essentially my Bible,” says Olatunji. “You rushed to those magazines to find out what the new cars looked like when the season began, and who was dominating on both sides of the country.”

Olatunji decided early on that he was going to be a drag racer. “I had a little plastic helmet when I was five years old,” says Olatunji, “and I’d get the tub to 100 degrees so it would have a bunch of smoke billowing off it so it looked like I was doing a burnout.” He began racing at 15, before he actually had a license. “Even before I had a permit I was driving around,” says Olatunji, “because back in the day at Detroit Dragway, we had an old tractor and a ’72 Ford pickup, and we could drive that thing around the racetrack before the spectators and the racers arrived.”

The first car Olatunji raced was an ’89 Chevy Beretta. “I poured every nickel I had and every nickel I didn’t into that thing,” says Olatunji. “I believe the first time I went down to the racetrack, I went 18.43 seconds. It was like molasses in February, but I felt like I was flying. No sooner than I got down to the end, I was figuring out, ‘What do I have to do to make this thing go faster?’ I think when I got done with it, I had it going around 16.20.”

Olatunji earned a mechanical engineering degree from Kettering University across the state in Flint, and worked in auto industry designing jobs before finding sponsorship from Pepsi and the US Army to kickstart his racing career. “Education is a cornerstone of my life, and it helped me get from the hood of Detroit to being able to live my dream,” says Olatunji. “I’m a drag racer. I go fast in a straight line and hope it stops. They get going, baby, but I don’t know if they’re gonna stop all the time, so when they slow down, that’s always a good day. That’s what I do. I’m not one to go in circles for three or four hours. I make that thing fly and I let it tap dance as quick as I can.”

Olatunji launched his own charity, the Leadfoot Foundation, which focuses on empowering underprivileged Detroit youth by annually giving away backpacks filled with school supplies, and in 2013 he became one of the stars of the Speed Channel reality show Dreams to Champions. But the lack of a local place to race gnawed at him. “I’ve had an opportunity to race at venues all across the country,” says Olatunji, “and being a native Detroiter, I looked in my backyard and I saw that we didn’t have any legitimate venues for folks to be able to experience the passion and excitement that I’ve been able to experience throughout my career. Being that I’m from the Motor City, and Detroit is the mecca for drag racing given that we put the world on wheels, we looked at it and said this will be a prime opportunity for us to bring an event here so that the people of Detroit can actually experience this in a legal fashion.”

It took almost two years to complete what Olatunji described as the “exhaustive” permitting process for the Showdown (including approvals from the city, airport, and FAA). At a meeting with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan held at Underground Resistance’s headquarters, Olatunji met Banks—aka “Mad Mike,” the former Parliament-Funkadelic session musician who founded Underground Resistance with DJ Jeff Mills in 1990 under the motto “Hard Music From A Hard City,” and whose UR record label has been the conscience and consciousness-raiser of Detroit’s internationally esteemed techno community ever since. Olatunji and Banks bonded immediately, and their alliance led to UR curating the music and providing the DJs for the Showdown. “Motown isn’t just the cars, it’s the cars and the music,” says Olatunji. “That’s what put us on the map and made us unique, so when folks left the Motor City Showdown, we wanted them to say, ‘We don’t know if we came to a race and a party broke out, or we came to a party and a race broke out.’”

Banks was elated at being asked to participate in the Showdown. “To be able to use the UR stuff when the guys were doing the burnouts was the highest honor,” says Banks, “and I think the ultimate music/car connection. Even more so than Motown because Motown is affiliated with cruising; UR is associated with horsepower.”

Olatunji wanted the Showdown to feel like an authentic Detroit experience and look like what a spectator might encounter at a street race. Toward that end, he decided against bracket racing, which pits two dissimilar cars against each other, in favor of grudge racing, where two cars begin at the same starting line and a person waves a flag to commence racing. Rather than 10,000 horsepower “funny cars” (where the car body flips up and the driver sits in the middle) or top-fuel dragsters (which feature big tires in the back, little skinny ones in front, and look sort of like a crane on its side), the Showdown featured door slammers, so-called because, unlike funny cars, they have operable doors. These most closely resemble the production vehicles people drive on the street. “Although funny cars and dragsters are very cool,” says Olatunji, “people can relate to a car that they can see on the road: ‘Oh, that’s a Camaro,’ ‘that’s a Firebird,’ ‘that’s a Mustang,’ ‘that’s a Charger,’ or whatever it might be.”

The Showdown also featured an auto show, called a “show and shine,” to showcase the DIY-decorated cars that Olatunji calls “dynamic art, Detroit’s Picasso.” For the final touch, Olatunji closed down French Road for the day. “That was symbolic for us,” says Olatunji. “I thought it’d be very cool that the primary parking lot that people used and walked to enter the main spectator gate was down French Road. You can still see the burned rubber tire marks there, and if you just looked down when you’re walking, you’d see that folks were getting down recently. As folks walked up they’d get that nostalgic feel that, man, a lot of folks have seen and heard about races here: You’re on hallowed ground. But as opposed to us doing it on French Road, we’re going legal, we’re going on the other side of the fence. It’s going to be something that we hope folks will talk about, kind of like the first hip-hop concert in Harlem 40 years ago.”

The Showdown crowd was remarkably heterogeneous: black, white, families with kids, old folks in “Detroit ¼ Mile Racing Association” gear, and young men in T-shirts bearing messages like “Drag Racing Is Like Sex: When It’s Good It’s Great, When It’s Bad It’s Still Pretty Good.” Olatunji considers the diversity of the crowd at the Showdown to be an “overwhelming success,” and atypical of a traditional drag race. “I believe we exposed legal drag racing to a large contingent of folks,” says Olatunji, “and they got to see that this wasn’t just a white-male-dominated deal that no one else can come in, engage, and enjoy themselves with. The community came out to show that there’s an appetite for this and that it’s something they want.”

As much as Olatunji hoped to invoke the street racing milieu, he also wanted to point out the stark contrast between the two forms of racing. “Drag racing gets a bad rap because illegal street racing is dubbed ‘drag racing’ in the media,” says Olatunji. “Folks say, ‘At a drag race last night on so on and so forth, two people were killed.’ No, that’s actually street racing. Drag racing is something else. Drag racing is in a controlled environment where when you get into a wreck, everyone runs to you. There’s EMS and safety personnel on site. In an illegal street race, there’s none of that. Folks tend to run away from you when you get into a wreck for the most part because they’re afraid they’re gonna get in trouble.”

Another huge difference between street and drag racing was that Chief Craig and the police department fully endorsed the Showdown. Craig ceremonially started the first race, and there was even a department recruiting table at the event, complete with a DPD-branded muscle car. Craig says that the mayor supports the idea for a permanent track, and that they’ve been having regular meetings on the issue, focusing on the airport or its adjacent area as the most natural location. “We think it’s going to create significant public safety and another way to introduce young people from our community to another sport, like the way I was introduced to it many years ago.”

Indeed, Craig has held a lifelong passion for drag racing. A native Detroiter, he built a muscle car in his parents’ backyard when he was 17—a 1970 Chevrolet Camaro, with a 350-cubic-inch small-block engine and 202 heads—with the sole purpose of wanting to go racing. Craig’s uncle used to bracket race at Detroit Dragway, and when he was 18 he gave the quarter-mile there a shot himself. “My first pass, I didn’t do very well, but it was exciting,” says Craig. “I also had a Plymouth Fury 318 two-barrel, not at all a race car, but I took it to the track just to get the experience of lining up at the line and activating the tree”—a reference to the “Christmas tree” column of colored lights that electronically starts most official NHRA drag races.

Craig planned to become an automotive engineer and design race cars, but left school to join the Detroit police force, later moving to Los Angeles. He served 28 years in the LAPD, and was chief of police in both Portland, Maine, and Cincinnati before returning to Detroit as chief in 2013. His time in law enforcement hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for muscle cars; he currently owns a Z06 Corvette and a 1970 Pontiac GTO. “I have a 650-horsepower car, but I don’t race it on the streets,” says Craig. “I’m more of a spectator now. I might have the cars that could do that, but I err on the side of safety.”

The quest to tame Detroit’s street racers has been a persistent issue ever since Craig’s youth, and writing tickets and impounding vehicles has barely dented the problem. “Even all the years I was in the Los Angeles Police Department, we didn’t have a challenge like this,” says Chief Craig. “It’s not that they don’t street race there, but it’s not organized to the degree it is here. But again, we are the Motor City, and this has been a historic activity for years, going back to the late sixties, or even before then.”