The Mysterious Sub

by ANDREW REGAN

Whether you live in a city and have been woken by the low hum of an exhaust too big for the car it��s attached to, or whether you live in a small coastal town and have watched perplexed as a convoy of souped-up little hatchbacks whiz around the promenade again and again; most of us have in some way experienced the mysterious world of the Boy Racer.

But what do we really know about that world? Well, we know that not a month goes by without a grizzly report of a young, male driver (and more often than not his passengers also) being killed in a horrific collision of some kind. Most recently the tragic tale of Jason Brain, 35, a notorious boy racer, who crashed his grey Peugeot on the A429, killing himself and five others.

But wait a moment. Aged 35? ��Boy�� Racer? Something else we see reported all too-often is the umbrella term ��Boy Racer�� being used wherever a traffic accident seems to need somewhere to place blame.

A study conducted by the West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership from 2005-2007 showed that only seven per cent of speeding and red light violations were committed by drivers aged 16-24, only 9,737 of the recorded 141,242 offences. Partnership Chairman Steve Thornton stated: ��It��s easy to blame young people for the ills of society. They are an easy target as speeders but these new figures prove this is not the case.��

Boy Racers, then, are generally unfairly represented in the press. However, dangerous or not, the question remains of why they��re there, cruising the mean streets of Aberystwyth, coastal Wales, until the early hours of the morning.

The truth can be found, perhaps, in the other things we know of this noisy yet mysterious sub-culture. We know that Boy Racers generally drive low-end cars, ��pimped�� to give the appearance of grandeur. The reason for this is that Boy Racers, young as they are, cannot afford the luxury of Porsches or Ferraris, or the high insurance of more expensive cars �C so with poor car finance, they turn to 1.1 Vauxhall Novas! And, as the allusion above to ��pimping�� suggests, another thing we know is that the Boy Racer culture has been inspired by certain areas of the media, like films such as The Fast and the Furious, TV shows like ��Pimp My Ride�� and console games like Need For Speed.

And yes, while playing driving games does encourage fast driving �C a study carried out by the British Motoring School revealed that a third of 16-24 year olds were more likely to drive fast after playing a computer game �C the same research revealed that frequent gamers were 10% more likely to pass their driving test first time.

So, perhaps all we can conclude about this strange culture is that young, impressionable people with limited finances choose to replicate what they see in films and in computer games, in order to make their lives more interesting. Maybe instead of blaming them for every road traffic accident, we should be teaching them the finer aspects of motoring, so they might appreciate more why a hood-scoop on a non-turbocharged car is a little ridiculous!