May 31, 2017 • 48 mins
Formed in 1987 and active until 1999, the Mid Night Club took illegal street racing to a whole new level. Join Scott and Ben as they delve into the clandestine adventures of the Mid Night Club, and find out why they so abruptly disbanded.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Go behind the Wheel, under the Hood and beyond with
car Stuff from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and
welcome to Car Stuff. I'm Scott, I'm Ben. As always,
we are joined by our super producers, got uh Tristan
(00:22):
after Dark McNeil after Dark I like it, or the
midnight er Turbo Turbo Yeah, after Dark sn bad after
Dark stuff bad? So why have we given him this
nickname today? Also, folks, he doesn't really learn about these
until we're on the air. Yes, it's already too late
(00:42):
at that point, right, all right, Well, I guess it's
probably a good, uh good thing in this situation because
this so we're gonna talk about today is a little
bit of illegal street racing and it's a club that
I ran across and I don't even remember what I
was searching for. Maybe it was just looking for some photos.
I saw some unusual stick is on some cars, and
I was curious about what they what they meant and uh,
(01:03):
and it kind of led me down this this this
rabbit hole, I guess, this pathway that I didn't really
intend to go down. But it turns out there's a
great story here, and I thought it was something that
we would share with you today, and Ben, I mean you,
you've drug into this just as much as I have
now at this point. Um, this this blows my mind.
The story, this is incredible. It's hard to believe that
something like this really did exist. And it's the stuff
(01:25):
of legends, really right. And it's it's become enshrined in
pop culture as well, which is something that we'll talk
about a little bit later in the podcast. Let's set
the scene. We are talking about possibly one of the
most famous or infamous, uh illegal street racing gangs in
(01:46):
world's history. They are called I'm going to butcher the
pronunciation here. They are called meto nito. That's Japanese. That's
terrible Japanese, but I can do a decent job for
ladies and gentlemen. In English. This is called the midnight Club.
Noticed the space between mid and night. That's important, that'll
(02:07):
come up later. But this is called the midnight club.
And the midnight Club was a very exclusive group, extremely exclusive,
as we'll find out. But these guys would spend and
this is all surmised, I guess, because there's a level
of secrecy to that. We'll discuss. But um, it's it's
rumored that some of these guys were spending millions of
dollars in order to get their cars in the proper
(02:30):
shape to to racing this. I don't even want to
call it a series. It racing this gang, that, this
midnight gang, this gang that would race UM on the
streets of well around Tokyo. I should say, because they
covered great distances, vast distances in this and we're talking
about cars that we're doing. Um, should we give it away? Ben?
There they were. They were driving in excess sometimes of
(02:51):
two hundred miles per hour on city streets, city streets,
highway well highways that went through publicity roads, public roads.
That's probably the best way to say it. And um,
But the thing is, you think that would sound like, um,
like wild less type stuff, right, I mean, it's chaos,
it's got to be chaos. But that's not the case.
These guys were very, um, very strict, very regimented in
(03:13):
the way that they did things and the way that
things had to be. And they claim this is a
funny claim, the claim that you know, their own personal
safety and the public safety was there their most important
focus in this whole thing, or maybe second behind you know,
top speed of course, but Um. They claim to be very,
very safe, and up to a certain point they really were.
(03:35):
Man but you know what, we're probably like giving away
too much right here at the head. Well, let's let's
start this way, okay. Uh, let's outline their origin story
and what differentiates this organization from other street racing groups,
of which they're they're multiple in Japan, right, Yeah, they're
multiple examples. This is not the only street racing group
in Japan by a long shot. So the Midnight Club
(03:59):
formed in seven. As Scott mentioned, it is far more regimented,
one would say, elitist than many other clubs. That's one
of the first differences. But one of the other big differences.
They sort of cast derision or cast dispersion on drifting
and auto cross. They were not about that. The only
(04:20):
thing this club was about in terms of car performance
was maximum velocity. Yeah, so they wanted to sustain top
speed for as long as possible. So they needed long,
long stretches of road to do that. And it turns
out that the area right around Tokyo, um, we'll say
that it's between let's say um, I think there's a
town called Chiba and there's a town called Yokohama and
(04:43):
it goes all I mean, if you want to just
think of that area, you know, with Tokyo and between
uh Kawasaki's in there somewhere, um all the highway system
around there, but particularly that route, the route that goes
around the bay, So that areas, you know, there's a
lot of highways. There's long stretches, of course, you know,
there's straits, but there also turns. It's but it's highway,
so there's a lot of gradual turns. It's not you know,
(05:04):
like there's an abrupt right turn in there or anything.
So the area is actually not a battery. And to
do something like this, and they would do it at
night when the traffic is extremely light, if if not
non existent really in some of the areas. Um. But
they would. It was very organized in the way they
would start things up. There be three cars, you know,
two cars that were gonna race. Now they'd start to
race somewhere around you know like sixty seventy five or
(05:25):
something like that, which sounds already kind of quick, you know,
seventy but at the sound of a horn from a
third car, that's when the race would begin at a
designated spot you know, whether it's a you know line
right before you get to a long straight or whatever.
They were. There were starting points, ending points that they
knew about now at the end of the race, but
the horn honk would signal them to go, and man,
(05:45):
these guys would go. They said that the average racing
speed was somewhere around one dred and ninety miles an hour.
Again on public roads with other traffic, there's no shutdown
of you know any um you know other called civilian
I don't know, other other traffic, public traffic on these roads.
So they're they're having to deal with that. Um, I'm
sure that they got into you know, some you know
(06:07):
complications with you know, the law trying to catch them.
That's a that's a good point, Scott. I mean, obviously
one of the reasons they're driving so late at night
is to minimize the chance of encountering pedestrians, civilian drivers,
or law enforcement. Yeah. Yeah, true, But you know that
those encounters happened. But they had an advantage over those guys,
and it's that they had faster cars. We'll discuss that too.
(06:27):
So man, I think, um, so we kind of got
like the the lay of the land. I guess you know,
they're they're driving fast where they're driving around the Tokyo area,
around the Bay. Um that they would go long, long distances.
They were all about maximum velocity. Um, you know, top speed,
sustained top speed for for long long periods of time.
And you know, to be honest, the cars these guys
(06:48):
are doing this and there they will talk about them
in detail in the moment. But um, there's street cars
that were tuned, and this is what a lot of
people refer to as the Golden Era of Japanese tuning,
you know, the right in the middle of the nine nineties,
late nineties and early nineteen nineties. Um, so they're taking
cars that um, you know weren't that fast obviously from
the factory obviously. Uh you know, they'd even take you know,
(07:10):
porches and make you know, pop them up a little
bit so that you know, they were capable of two
miles an hour um and ferraris and stuff like that
at the beginning. But as this tuning era kind of
came to be in the in the nineties, uh, different
vehicles like r X seven's and supers and uh you know,
well GTRs. Of course those were high end cars. Skylines,
things like that, would would would start to enter this
mix and and be accepted by the group. Um, and
(07:33):
I guess we've we've kind of set the stage, I
guess with some some little details here and there about
what it was all about. But um, it's a fascinating
group and there's a there's a lot of secrecy. So
to participate in this group, like to to join the club,
it was an easy thing because you might think, well,
I got a nice car, it's kind of fast. But
but these guys had some standards. They had some some
(07:53):
some some certain characteristics that your car had to have
and that you had to obey in order to in
order to enter this group. So do you want to
talk a little bit about how how people would join? Yeah, sure,
let's do that, all right. So, if you wanted to
join this club, if you had heard the rumors, or
(08:14):
perhaps one day you were coming home late on traffic
you heard a distant rumble behind you and then by
the time you blinked, you saw tail lights and you
wondered who the heck was that, you would have a
lot of work ahead and some of the first stuff
you would have to do is work on your vehicle, right. Uh,
(08:37):
it has to, as Scott said, be capable of racing
over a hundred nine miles per hour or this is crazy.
So you have to I think the minimum speed that
they required it had to be able to reach one
sixty hundred sixty. But they said that the average racing
(08:58):
speed was somewhere around one. Course, they pushed that above
two hundred. I mean like two to ten is the
range they were getting into again public roads. Can you
imagine that? So yeah, it's it's something that you have
to really really work on a stock car, you know,
it comes out of the factory to get to that
kind of that kind of that kind of speed Golden
era of Japanese tuning. So let's say you managed to
(09:21):
make it to one meeting because you have dropped thousands
of dollars soup it up your car if you are
allowed to hang out with them. You are an apprentice
for at least a year, a solid year, a solid year,
and you have to attend every single meeting for a
year to show your serious about it. Yeah, but that
(09:42):
wasn't it though, right, Like if you span the whole
apprenticeship year and you make it to every event, to
every every meeting every you know, everything that they had
to do. Uh, then you you weren't assured a position
were you know, you were not. Only ten percent of
the drivers would qualify for full membership and and that
is okay. And even so even if you make it
(10:04):
into that ten percent, you have to prove that you
can handle that type of speed on public roads and
be not a Again I laugh at this, like how
can you not be a danger at that speed on
public roads? But you have to prove that you're not
a danger to the public and you're not a danger
to other racers as well at that speed you have
to be able to handle the vehicle. UM as a
(10:25):
pro would really to become a member? And so how
would they distinguish between you know, like who was an apprentice,
who was a member? Who was not in this club
at all? Because people wanted to be in there, they
wanted they wanted to claim that they were in there.
You know, there's a lot of people that um kind
of around the edge of the things, the outskirts of things,
and they want to pretend is if they're in the group,
but they're really not. Yeah, that was that was a
(10:46):
no no in this in this situation. And you know
a lot of people laugh at you know, decals, right
when you put decals on your car. They claim certain
things like you know, they put on, ah, I don't know,
an n HR a sticker on your on your street
car and then you're trying to drag race people at
the light or something, and people kind of laugh at
there or whatever. But these stickers that they distributed to members,
(11:06):
and it was a special issue sticker. You know, it
had a certain look, a certain font, certain it was
made a certain way, it had certain dimensions. All this
except no substitute. It had to be their club sticker.
If you put that on your vehicle, that meant you
were part of something and and it meant it really
did mean something. If you tried to put one of
those stickers on yourself, if you had one manufactured, if
(11:28):
you created one yourself and you tried to put that
on your vehicle and you were not a member of
the club, there were some dire um consequences to that action. Right,
your car would be vandalized, as the plight most plight
way to say, yeah, some cars were burned to the
ground because they were saying, you know, this is an
elite group. It takes a lot to be in this
(11:49):
and we, you know, put everything that we got into this.
You know, this is our this is not only our hobby,
this is it's practically our life. Really. I mean a
lot of tuners, a lot of master tuners. I guess
there and in Japan were really the end of this,
and that the peoples will find out some of the
members of these UH do own tuning shops and that's
kind of their thing. Um. But if you were trying
to pretend as if you were in this club and
you were not in the club, you would definitely pay
(12:11):
the consequences, right, and this spread their legend even further, right,
the idea that essentially the secret society existed in the
heart of Japan UH and would take vengeance upon those
who disobeyed its rules. You know this this concept, I
(12:34):
guess the best the way I guess the best way
to say it is it fascinated the public, and UH
and racing fans in other countries as well began to
hear about this, but very few people actually made it
to a meeting because it was really you had to
know what you were looking for to even make it
to a meeting. I mean, it was it was a
(12:55):
chance occurrence. If you even saw these guys on the
road or at at a bus stops them or a
truck stop or whatever on the side of the road,
it was like, you know, they met at certain times
at certain places, but they're passing by two d miles
an hour, and you don't know where they're gonna stop
and where they're gonna start, and you know where the
meetup is happening. It's all very secretive. The whole thing
(13:16):
is based on secrecy. Like they were such a tight group.
They didn't want everybody to be involved. I didn't want
you know, uh spectators to uh, you know, be in
the way of things. I guess, yeah, I didn't want
the cops to know. So I guess the only way
that you would really um, you know, happened across these
guys is just by chance or by a careful reading
(13:38):
of the newspaper. Yeah, this is clever. I like my
favorite part. Yeah, So let's let's hear the way that
they would organize these meetups because even to the members, uh,
they didn't know what was going on going on until
I guess maybe last minute, right, I mean, the week
before to organize a meet up. The leader of the
team would place an AD in a local newspaper in Tokyo,
(14:00):
under which they're you know, there are there are many yeah,
and it would be in the classified section, and it
wouldn't sound like a racing meeting at all. Instead, it's
the subject of the ad. The you know, the ostensible
subject of the AD would be something that the group
had decided on at their previous meeting, so by word
(14:20):
of mouth essentially, So you only know about this if
somebody told you or if you were at that meeting.
And then the team members could look up the AD
and the ad would tell them the location to begin
the race at the exact time. So an example of
the ad, we have an example of it. What what
would it read like? I would say something like, you know,
(14:41):
small handbags at discount prices for more information, I'm available
for meet up at the de Kou parking area on
Thursday between eleven pm and two am, thank you, And
so it would have nothing to do with racing, but
it would say the name of the place, the day
and the time, and it would be between eleven and
two am. And you, of course they're they all know
(15:01):
exactly when to go you know it's one am or whatever,
it's gonna be one am at this parking or they
wouldn't tell them where, uh that would be the location
that's given to them there. But they hide it in
these ads that you know, pretend to be as if
you know, they're selling discount handbags or you know, something
that is just something that no one would ever look
twice at unless somebody happen to want to discount handbag.
(15:21):
I guess maybe, And then it happened across run across
this group. But you know, one thing, Ben, we're talking
about secrecy, and we didn't mention this in the Apprentice
thing that um or during during the Yeah, I guess
when you're talking about the Apprentice, it was a very
limited group. I mean we're talking like I think at
one point membership swelled to something like seventy five members,
(15:42):
but it was like thirty around. There was about the
average for all the years that this was in existence,
and so it remained a tight group. And the secrecy thing,
it goes even farther than you might think because they
were so careful about not feeling who they are, what
they did, or what you know, the cars were about
or anything that they didn't even tell each other what
(16:05):
was going on. Really, you couldn't ask questions if you
were in the group. It was one of those strict
rules again, these rules and regulations through this whole series
or group or club that you couldn't even tell other
members anything about your car. You couldn't tell them how
you were funding the vehicle, you know, how you were
able to spend in one of the case, two million
(16:26):
dollars on his car, two million on a car to
make it go you know, two twenty miles or whatever
it was. Um, you couldn't talk about where you worked,
You couldn't talk about anything how you were funding your
racing effort, or what you did during the day. It's
just it was it was an absolute no and it
was forbidden to talk about once you were remember this group,
So secrecy was a was a big, big issue with them.
(16:49):
They maintain that throughout the whole run of the club
and uh and it just kind of it trickles into
every little thing that they do. You'll see it, you know,
come up later as well. Um, it's a fight club
for cars. Yeah. And you might think, okay, well, why
don't you know, you gotta believe that police are just
kind of hanging out waiting for these guys to pass
that they're going to um. You know, they're gonna just
(17:11):
set up traps because they know that invariably they're gonna
meet they're gonna meet up with these guys, will just
be able to to to nab them, you know, like
watching them come by, or you know, you're not faster
than the radio, so they're going to catch them. Right.
Didn't quite work out that way for the police because
there was something called the gentleman's agreement or a gentleman's agreement,
and I think we should come back and talk about
(17:32):
that after a word from our sponsor, and we have
returned a gentleman's agreement to say yes, yeah, yeah, And
this is in particular one that well, actually there's two
(17:53):
parts of this and this is a bit of a sidebar,
but gentleman's agreement comes up in a lot of different things.
It's not just it's not just the one we're gonna
talk about today. So the one that in the one
in particular that that hampered the police was something called
the nineteen seventy seven Japanese Automotive Gentleman's Agreement. And this
this is crazy. This limited the police vehicles and supposedly
(18:17):
all the the the civilian vehicles, you know, the public
vehicles to a top speed of one dred and ten
miles per hour or one eighty kilometers per hour, which
was a legal requirement. I guess legal. I'm doing the
air quote thing set forth by this nineteen seventy seven
Japanese Automotive Gentleman's Agreement. And so the police are driving
(18:37):
around in these cars that can't go above a hundred
and ten miles per hour. These guys go was in
past at two hundred miles an hour. Really not a chance. Yeah,
And by the time they get the radio coordination to
get them down the road, there's still no chance of
catching them trying to catch up to a motorcycle from
a dead stop. Yeah. And if the thing is this
(19:00):
is this this was set about because of a okay,
two parts of this, as I said, and I'll try
to get through this in the most clear way possible.
But the nine agreement was really um all about the
Bossasuku guys. Remember the old Bossasuku guys that we talked about,
the bike gangs, and they I think they had cars
(19:21):
also at some point. But It started out with motorcycles.
So the idea was that, you know that the Japan
Automobile Manufacturers Association or JAMA j m a UH suggested
that the speed limiting devices be put into all vehicles.
We're talking about motorcycles and cars, and the top speed
(19:41):
was gonna be one and ten miles per hour because
the Bossasuku guys and girls were causing a lot of
chaos on the road. They're causing some havoc because they
were they were all about stirring up um, stirring up
trouble everywhere. Really, I mean, doesn't the name I don't
have the name somewhere. I think it means Bossasuku, means
violent speed tribes and so you can understand that. Well,
(20:01):
I'll go back and listen to the car stuff episode
on that. We did that then went January of I
think it was, and the idea was that, you know,
if if everybody did this, if all manufacturers supported this idea,
and they did because they wanted to rid the town
of this, you know, this this uh, this chaos. So
they said, well, let's make it so that no vehicle
(20:21):
can go above a hundred and ten miles per hour.
And it actually worked. It worked for a while until
you know groups like you know the bosses, Well, the
Bossasuku guys were able to to bypass all that stuff
with tuning, and so were the car um well, the
car guys, I guess the Midnight Club and you know
other clubs like it. Again, Bossasuku wasn't just motorcycles, it
was also cars. But this gentleman's agreement that came about
(20:43):
in seventy seven was not the only one that happened.
There was another one that came about in nine, which
is also during the time frame that we're talking about here,
because um, this group started in nine seven. In nine,
there was a another agreement in the automotive industry, and uh,
this was between all Japanese manufacturers that agreed that no
(21:06):
production car would have more than two hundred and seventy
six horsepower. Um so the agreement. While the agreement ended
in two thousand fives, we'll find out in a moment.
But um, the whole idea behind these these gentlemen's agreements
is that it's not really illegally, it's not a legally
binding thing. It's it's just an agreement, a handshake, you
know that that does this, it's like an understanding. Yeah,
(21:28):
it's it's on your honor. You know. It's like, you know,
we we say we're not going to do this, and
therefore we're not going to do this. And if everybody
adheres to that, it works. It's like, um, it just it.
It fulfills itself that way. I mean that you know,
no one it doesn't have to be enforced because everybody
just does it. Right. So all these manufacturers had agreed
to these speed limiting devices back in the seventies. Now
(21:51):
top horse power ratings would be two and seventy six,
and they said that, you know, the reason was because
you know, this is a country where the maximum speed
limit is is sixty two miles per hour. Youwhere in
the country you can't go faster than that, So why
not just adhere to this and that will work. So
all the advertising and everything you'll see from that era
up until about two thousand five, we'll say that you know,
if it's I it's a high end vehicle, you know,
(22:12):
something that's you know G t R or something like that,
or you know one of the superbut cars like a
w r X. From prior to two thousand five, it's
going to say it has two D and seventy six
horse power, and I've seen other numbers that say to eighties,
so you might see it as high as to eighty,
but right around that area. Even though it's kind of
everybody you know, gave a wink and a nod that
you know, we know this car is three horse power
(22:34):
or whatever it is, but we for advertising purposes say
two D seventy six horse power horse power, And it's
just kind of the way it went for a long
time until Accura or Honda, I guess debut the legend
uh in I believe it was. I think it's just
said two thousand five, right, and it was with a
three point five leader V six uh legend or I
(22:55):
think it's the r R L here in the US
that had three hundred horse power, and they just outright
of just blew it. They just said, you know, that's it,
We're done with this this agreement. And then right after
that it was kind of like the floodgates opened up
and everybody else started, you know, saying, well, you know,
well we've got this NSX. Also, look, our stat's again accurate,
but um, it's a bad example there. But um, the
RX seven came out, you know, with Mazda, and they said, well,
(23:17):
we've got a three hundred horse power to set r
X seven that's coming out. Um, I think there were
you know. Of course NSX came out with a four
hundred horse power version. Lexis had a three hundred horse
power vehicles soon after. So as soon as they did it,
you know, the advertising changed. And it's not so much
that the they really were doing anything different. They were
just finally admitting to the public we have we've been
building these cars that have more than that, but we've
(23:39):
been adhering to this. I guess we'll call it a
silly gentleman's agreement up until this point. It wasn't silly
to begin with, but everybody knew how to get around it.
And of course the gangs like you know, the Midnight
Club and the Bossasuku guys, they knew how to get
it around it early on as well, but they were
the ones flaunting it. There wasn't the manufacturers that we're
doing it up until oh five, Um, these guys as
(24:00):
we're doing it right in the middle of the agreement
when it was supposed to be limited, and the and
the cops were adhering to it, and that was the problem.
They weren't allowed to do anything different. And finally, I
think somebody said, we need to we need to get
the equipment out on the streets to be able to
catch these guys. So they did up the police car
horsepower and and you know, get some hotter vehicles out
there so they could catch these guys or at least
(24:21):
keep up with them. So it becomes an escalating arms
relative sort Yeah. And I know that's a long description
of it, but you had to understand that, like why
they felt they could get away with it, and why
they did get away with it for so long, and
and part of partially why they were allowed to do
so for so long, because this could have changed much earlier.
But the fact that the public and law enforcement seemed
(24:46):
to acknowledge the midnight clubs high prioritization of safety like
that had an immense influence on the timing of the
agreement laps well. The public kind of they revered them
for this. They said, well, you know, this is a
group that actually it's not like the Boss soup of
(25:08):
guys that are out there just causing chaos and you know,
like smacking the back window of my car as they
arrived by it, you know, a hundred and twenty miles
an hour or whatever, uh, you know, with a bat
or something. Because they were doing they were causing all
kinds of trouble, these guys, and they were just like
swarming around vehicles and you know, nearly causing accidents, if
not causing accidents, Um, just general chaos. Really you can
imagine just again, listen to that episode. You'll hear it.
(25:30):
But um, these guys were more about you know, they're sure,
they're they're going dangerously fast and you gotta watch for them,
I suppose. But a hundred and ninety miles an hour,
two hundred miles an hour, you don't get much of
a chance to react to a car that you see
in first in your rear view mirror and then it's gone,
you know, then it's it's beyond your your line of
sight in front of you. Um, so you know, if
(25:50):
you just maintain what you're doing, they're gonna go around you.
They know that these guys are I guess if I
want to say, say I keep stumbling and when I
say safe enough, but it again two in a public road,
that's it's hard to fathom, but it happens. Um, I
guess they trusted them enough to say, yeah they can,
they can maneuver these roads safe enough. So I feel
(26:11):
safe around those guys and not around this other group.
Let's look at some of the specific vehicles to sure, right,
let's get in, let's dig into the good stuff. So
we talked about let's let the badger out of the
bag here, my friend. We talked about that vehicle that
had over two million dollars worth of mods and rebuilding
(26:34):
on it. What was the Blackbird? Yeah, this one was
a it's a portion of nine thirty. It's in a
nine eleven turbo and insanely fast, I mean insanely fast.
And if you want to look it up, I mean
you can. You can search for an article called there's
actually a really good article on just this one vehicle
and finding this car. Now. Um, it's called finding the
(26:56):
Midnight Racing nine thirty and it's in speed Hunters if
you want to get a good run. I know what
that cars all about. But um, this is the Yoshida
Specials nine thirty, which is a maroon colored nine eleven.
Um again rumored that there was what two million dollars
put into this week in order to make it go
faster than another portion that had set this record, a
speed record called the Yellow Bird, I think, and I
(27:17):
don't have the details on the Yellow Bird right now,
that's a different podcast. But um, you know there were
cars like you know, this this Blackbird, and there were
other cars that had names like that. But you know
we're talking about early on in this series. There are
serious to keep contact. But the group of Club Gang, uh,
there were Portion nine eleven's, there were Ferraris, other supercars,
you know, similar high dollar sports cars like that. But
(27:39):
then the tuner cars came in, you know, with with
the lower end vehicles that had just dumped a pile
of money into the engine development and you know, making
them lightweight and safer for the right driver. But we're
talking about again like Supras and GTRs and um skylines.
I think we're in there. Arc seven's just you name
the Japanese manufacturer it was in on this in the
(28:00):
midnight club in some way. Really, Um, you know there's
somebody there to tune it and make it better and
and somehow get it up two hundred and sixty miles
an hour minimum, if not up to two hundred two
hundred plus insane. And again, nobody knows. Nobody except for
this guy knows how he was able to channel this
much money into this. Well, there's other people that know,
(28:22):
but they're not talking. See that's the secret. That's the
beauty of the secrecy thing is that there are people
out there that will do this stuff and they just
will keep tight lipped about it. They don't have to
brag about it. They don't have to talk about they
they know what they were capable of doing, or what
they helped them, what they helped him do he himself.
I believe the person that owns this vehicle, I believe
is a tuner. So a lot of that work is
(28:43):
probably done in the house, but it takes a lot
of work. There's a lot of collaboration that goes on
to make a car go this fast. And they also
they would sometimes practice at a track, a local track
I think, and it was like a superspeedway almost really.
It was a huge bank turn track and you'll see
a lot of toographs us of these midnight vehicles, I
mean that midnight club vehicles on this, uh the superspeedway.
(29:06):
And this is owned by a guy that would allow
them to go out and I guess give it to
give a little bit of shakedown. Um. And the track
was called and I'll probably blow the pronunciation of this,
but it's your tobby test track, I think it was.
And this is they would sometimes reach, you know again,
almost two miles an hour on this track. It's a
high banked, you know, steep incline, banking on the on
(29:28):
the turns. And unfortunately the track was demolished so it's
not around anymore. I think the the guy that owned
the track, his name is Masa Saito. And after well, shoot,
I'm gonna get into the history of what happened here
in a moment, but um, he died later on, I think,
and like I want to say, in the early two thousand's,
(29:49):
you know what's got that's this is a perfect time
for us to introduce a plot twist because we've talked
a lot about the formation of the club, it's rules,
its rivalries, but we have yet to talk about the
current state of the Midnight Racing Team. And we will
(30:10):
scoot to the edge of your seats, ladies and gentlemen,
unless it's gonna you know, mess up. You're driving and
we'll be back after a word from our responsible and
we're back in Benue tease that we were going to
hear about the current state of the Midnight Racing Club. Now,
(30:32):
what's going on with him right now? Nothing? They're gone. Well,
they are the official organization, the official secret society no
longer exists. And due to the nature of secrecy in
this organization, the former members are not going to talk
about it now. But we know what happened. There is
(30:55):
a specific event that happened in and they immediately disbanded
after that. UM. This event, this, this occurrence is something
that again this is part of why people UM actually
gave them quite a bit of credit. They said, you know,
this is this is a group that six to what
they say, they mean what they say, they say what
they mean, and they did they really did this. So
(31:16):
what happened was in there was a group of racers
that are out on the street at the Midnight Racing Club.
They're out there as they do here, doing their rivalries
in a safe professional way. And as we said, you know,
the Boss Suku guys were also out on the roads
at that time and they had a bit of a
rivalry going. Of course, you know, because you know, well,
who's faster that kind of thing. They're caused in trouble
(31:37):
for each other. Theku ambush them, they were waiting for them. Yeah,
so they're waiting for these guys to pass because you
know they're they're again they create chaos everywhere they go,
these boss of Suku guys, or at least they did.
I don't know if the current ones still do. Um,
but this is this happened in again in nineteen. There's
three am, around three am, and the Bossuku the bikers
(31:58):
have been drinking. Yeah, so there's a drunk bike ride
around the road and he's gone really fast, I mean
like a hundred and sixty miles an hour fast. So
he's driving recklessly. This this uh, this biker, this Bossasuku
driver biker rather, and he's driving recklessly down the road
and he's scaring all these other drivers you know, on
the road because he's driving so fast and again you know,
(32:19):
kind of swerving in and out of his lane and
just causing him again just general chaos really and that's
a very uh. This leads just to a very important part.
So remember how he said that they would meet up.
I get the feeling they didn't confirm this bike get
the feeling they had mapped out commonly understood roots, but
the bikers aren't going to know what those routes are.
(32:40):
So when a member of the club accepts challenge from
a biker and they're just racing each other on an
unplanned route, accidents happen. They deviate from the roads that
they usually or the roads that they were planning to
use that evening. They accidentally enter a high traffic area, Yeah,
the high train araphic area. And remember they're going to
(33:01):
one hundred and sixty approximately a hundred and sixty at
this time. So the bus super writer loses control, hits
the motorist and causes this huge chain reaction crash. Uh. Now,
the motorists crashes into the barricade and he died instantly. Unfortunately, Um,
the midnight club racers slowed down, you know, because they
saw what was going they saw the traffic, you know,
(33:22):
I realized that they need to back down a bit. Um.
And the bus super writer, of course, he perished as
well in this crash because you know, he caused the
initial accident. So two people dead right there. Eight other
motorists were hospitalized. Um, they you know, the group itself
had a policy that they had said in place long
before this, like we're in the very inception of the
(33:44):
club back in the late eighties. Uh, they said that, um,
if ever it happened, that you know, if anyone was
to die in the existence of the club, whether it's
a racer or a motorist or was you know, indirect
or directly the club's fault, this whole group would disband.
That would be the end of the whole thing immediately
and forever. Yeah, and they did that. They did exactly that.
(34:05):
So you know, this was the first instance that it happened.
And of course it was caused by you know, it
doesn't matter that it wasn't caused by a midnight club racer,
was caused by the Bussuku guy, you know, initiating this
whole thing. And you know they went into this this
wrong the wrong area, but they were involved. They were involved,
that's right. There's no I mean, you still can point
fingers in this case because you know, there's still it's
still in a legal street racing gang, so that you know,
(34:26):
there's that aspect to it. Um. But they did hold
to their word and they disbanded immediately, and that was it.
They just it's like one of those things. They never
talked about it again. And the members that were in
the club then and have been in the club, you know,
throughout the history of it, from all the way through,
was said, Uh, they are very tight lipped about it.
(34:47):
Now there's a few people that, you know, we'll say, yeah,
I was in the club, and you know, here's my
old car and it's still got stickers on it and
it's verified as an original you know, midnight club racer.
But they just won't talk about they want talk about
other members. They just don't feel comfortable sharing a whole
lot about their experience in this club. It's it's very secretive,
right to the very end and right to today. Right
(35:09):
we can, however, connect the dots, we can string together
some clues. There's very very compelling evidence that a lot
of founders of famous Japanese tuning shops were members, and
that just comes from that comes from a couple of sources.
There are confirmed statements which are few and far between,
(35:31):
but like Scott said, there are they are out there
if you want to check. And then there are histories
of cars that have been seen racing suring that time period.
And have the sticker and then exclusively go to one
tuning shop or another to get worked on. Makes perfect sense,
doesn't it that you know, the the owners of these
tuning shops would be the guys that were in on
(35:52):
the ground floor of this, because that was again, this
is the beginning really of the Japanese not the very beginning,
but it's really the a day, the golden era of
Japanese street car tuning, And it makes sense that the
guys that were involved in this, you know the ones that, um,
they were in on the ground floor, the ones that
were the originators of the series and had these extremely
(36:13):
expensive cars that had you know, the best of the
best at the time. Uh, you know that they were
the top end of everything. Um, they were the ones
that you know, still own the vehicles. They still keep
them in the back of the shop. They're covering under
you know, a tarp maybe but or they're you know,
they're on display, but not maybe out in the front window.
You know, they're in the they're in the back tucked
in behind you know five other cars that you know,
(36:34):
you can't really see it unless you make an attempt
to go back and see it, or they're in like
these wooden crates. Uh, like where they put the Ark
of the Covenant at the Indiana Jones spoiler alert and
stamped on it it says top secret street race your
car spoiler alert. Isn't it like years older this? You know,
it's weird about it, Like is it? Is it a
(36:54):
spoiler to say that, uh, Abraham Lincoln didn't make it
all the way through his term? Wait? What, Ben? How
can you ruin something like that? I'm sorry that I
know you were watching that documenty minary series. Yea, now
I know what's going to happen. Great, Yeah, it's like
(37:14):
when I ruined the Titanic for people, Wait, something happened.
It's just a romantic comedy, alright, But honestly, it does.
It does make sense that you know, the guys that
we know were involved in this were involved in and
you can put the pieces together. I assume that you
know that's that's accurate. But to get those guys to really,
(37:34):
you know, to expel expound on that, you know, that's
to say, like, you know, here's here's what happened, here's
the way everything worked. They're not going to do that.
They're not going to also talk about you know exactly
what they had done to their cars, and and what
you know the other person had done to their vehicles,
even though they saw it. They never really we're comfortable
discussing that with anybody with and to a degree, I
can understand why, even just beyond the secrecy um, the
(37:58):
fact that people could feel and in any way complicit
in injury or death of someone else, you know, it
weighs on you, even if you weren't one of the
people in the car. Sure, so I can understand hesitancy
to talk about it even without the secrecy. This would
make for a fantastic documentary. And we mentioned at the
(38:21):
top of the show that this has become a incredibly
influential organization, I guess posthumously right after it's disbanding. It
inspired numerous other street racing groups yea, even some called
the Midnight Club, which which I wouldn't mess with. I
(38:44):
would not either, But you know, it's so far, so good,
I guess, I mean, but they're there. I don't want
to say cheap imitations, but there are imitations that don't
quite live up to the standards of the original, I guess,
and and even even the way it's written as different,
and there's not there's not the space between mid and
night to it's it's together. But they try to emulate
everything about the club and do things in the same way,
(39:05):
but it's just not exactly the same. Well, they might
be on a budget, man, you know, looking at some
of the cars, you know, these Japanese tuner cars that
we see today that are trying to be like these
midnight clubs or even you know they name them other things,
but illegal street racing groups, you know, the incredible Vegle.
I don't think they're on a budget at all when
you take a look look at what they've got it.
(39:25):
I mean, they're they're some of them are pretty wacky,
you know what they do, and a lot of led
lighting and stuff like that, like aesthetic rather than performance. Yeah,
and these guys again we're just about like just paired
down performance. I mean, it was like the cars looked
rather plain if you want to, if you can call
them that. I mean they had some minor things that
you know, allowed them to stick to the ground a
little bit better, you know, some arrow improvements, but for
(39:46):
the most part they were taking stuff off of their
car to make it lighter and faster and slicker through
the air. So the cars you'll see from the original
group are a little bit uh and I wouldn't. They're
not disappointing. I mean, they're really cool cars. It's just
they don't look like the modern cars that you know,
can are capable of achieving two hundred miles an hour UM.
And again, these guys would do this for you know,
(40:07):
twenty minute runs at a time. They're going two hundred
miles an hour. There's not a lot of you know,
modern day supercars that can do that. So I give
them a lot of credit for being able to do
what they did when they did it. And and that's
one other little I guess a facet of the story
that I find really fascinating is that you can't you
can't find a lot of footage of these cars on
(40:27):
the on the road. In fact, it's it's almost impossible
to find more than just a few seconds. I think
there's a a YouTube video that has maybe thirty seconds
of footage, you know, the shot with like a grainy
VHS recorder back in the nineties of these guys driving
on again a public road at two hundred miles an
hour UM. But the reason for this and I was thinking, like,
(40:49):
why are there so few videos and even photos. There's
a there's a lot of photos of just the cars themselves,
but not of them really in action. And the reason
is because you got to think of the time. This
was late to nighties, you know, all the way through
the not everybody had a way to capture what was happening,
you know, on hand, like we do now. It doesn't
(41:09):
you don't just pull out the device from your pocket
and shoot a little video. You had to bring out
the big VHS camcorder and put it on your shoulder
and shoot it. And if you didn't know where these
guys were going to be or where you know, when
they were going to pass, the opportunity was over. You
couldn't like, you know, keep it with you and then
just jump in the back of the van and then
you know, try to try to capture this. It wasn't
that way. You didn't you didn't have an iPhone in
(41:31):
your pocket. So even photographs, if you were lucky enough
to snap some photographs of these things, um, there's a
good chance that the people that you know, we're old
enough to do that in and you know, there's a
good chance that they don't really have a reliable way
to put those photos online today. So there's probably a
(41:51):
lot of them. They're just kind of hanging out in
a scrap books somewhere or in you know someone's uh,
you know, toolbox in the garage. Some great photographs but
there's just no way to get them online. There is,
but they don't know how to do it, or you know,
have no wasting or no interest in doing it. Yeah. Right,
So but to have that scrap book, Yeah, I know
that's probably again an over explanation of of what's going on,
(42:12):
But you gotta remember because I've been trying to trying
desperately to find to find footage of these guys on
the road in you know, from the ninety nineties, and
it's really really hard. Um, you can find again that
thirty second clip I think in this YouTube video and
that's about it. But um, you can find modern vehicles
that are you know, pushing the limits of two hundred
miles an hour on the highway and you'll see you know,
(42:34):
a little one minute videos of acceleration, you know, like
from you know sixty two to two and ten or
whatever it is, you know, in a in a corvette
that has d horsepower. But it's not the same as
seeing these guys do their thing, you know, in the
middle of Tokyo in the middle of the night. Uh,
you know what, years ago. You're right, And this is
where we get to one of the most important parts
(42:56):
of today's episode. Ladies and gentlemen, On the off chance
that you happen to have any knowledge first or second
hand of this club, of the midnight Club, let us know.
You can write to us directly, and if frankly, usually
we asked for you to write to us and tell
(43:20):
us something that you think we should share with your
fellow listeners. At this point, Scott, you know, I've been
doing a lot of a lot of digging and listening
to what you said because there's not a lot of
info out there. So at this point, if you wouldn't
just give me an inside scoop, I promise I won't
tell anybody. No. I okay, I'll probably tell Scott, but
(43:43):
I won't tell anybody else. I am just so so
baffled by the the success of their secrecy, you know, yeah,
how it lasted for so long. I mean we're now
eighteen years after the culmination of this, this whole thing.
I mean it ended in. People are still tight lipped
(44:05):
about it. I mean they know they were in there,
you know they're in the group, but they're just not
saying anything about it. I mean a little bits and
pieces here and there, just to get you, you know,
just get you hooked, I guess. And I even saw
somewhere there's a forum and that you'll you'll run across
stuff like this if you're digging into the midnight club,
and I encourage you to do it because some really
interesting stories about individual cars are out there too. Again
that that finding uh you know the Blackbird or the
(44:27):
nine thirty, the portion nine thirty, that story is pretty fascinating.
But you'll, you'll you run across things that like people
who claim to have an inside scoop on um you
know what's going on. And one person and one of
these one of these forums that I was and they
claimed to be kind of tight with you know, some
of the original members and said that every year they
still have an annual meetup that uh, you know, some
(44:48):
of the original members come back and meet up in
a in a designated spot and still kind of do
this a little bit. I don't know if they make
an actual run but they still have an annual meet
up somewhere and again completely secret, no one really knows
about it. But this guy is spelling the beans that
you know, it happens. And I don't even know if
you can you trust that though. I mean, is that
somebody just kind of you know, being Mr big Stuff
(45:09):
on a forum somewhere, you know, right, yeah, an internet
tough guy. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean like bragging
like you know, it's you know, like making people assume
that he knows more than he really does. Know. You know,
There's a lot of people that do that kind of thing,
and I feel like this might be one of those cases.
So I don't I don't know. I mean again, you
wouldn't know unless you happened across this group of people
(45:30):
that gathered, you know, at at a truck stop or
a um, you know. I just I don't know where
they would gather really, I mean it could be anywhere,
could be a racetrack somewhere, who knows. Again, secrecy, you
might know. And again, if you want to write to me,
I promise I won't even show up. I'll just read
about it. I just want to get it. I just
want to get an inside view of this, it's I mean,
(45:55):
to be honest, this is one of the more intriguing
stories that we've run across in the last couple of months.
I know that, you know, we're constantly looking for new
topics and things, but I really dug into this one,
and I don't even know if I was able to
convey enough how um, I'm just jo how fascinating this
series is. And I even I keep calling this series,
how how fascinating this gang was? And uh, and I
(46:16):
just want to know more and more about it. But
the problem is there's a limit. There's there's only so
much out there, and beyond traveling to Tokyo and starting
to do some some real journalism, some real digging around,
some real you know, detective work, you're not gonna find
out a whole lot more. You just have to go
with the bits and pieces that are online right now,
spot On, and we hope that you have enjoyed this
episode at least half as much as we've enjoyed trying
(46:39):
to dig through what information is out there. We also
hope that this functions as you know, the entrance to
the rabbit hole for you, right yeah, the first step, yep,
and it is a rabbit hole because you'll you'll start
to find little baits and bits and pieces here and there,
and uh and dig around the forums like I did,
and then you'll start looking up things like the Gentleman's
(47:01):
Agreement and uh read about you know, j d M culture,
I guess you know, the Japanese domestic market um tuning,
you know, and the golden era of tuning and you
know what what that was all about. And it just
seems like there's a lot of different, really interesting side
stories to this whole thing. It's not just the gang
itself and not just what they did, but everything is
surrounding it. It's really interesting and you can find you know,
(47:26):
it might be worth our time to uh post a
couple of pictures maybe of the blackbird on our social
media where you can find us at Facebook and Twitter.
We are car Stuff HSW on both of those and
you can write to us directly if you have a
lead for me, or you know, I feel like that's
(47:48):
a long shot, or you have some thoughts on street
racing in general, right because this is sometimes a controversial topic. Right,
So do you think are you, as we used to
always say, are you for it? Or again it. Do
you participate in street racing? And you know we're not
(48:08):
recommending that anybody break any laws, but if you have
a story you think your fellow listeners would enjoy, we'd
love to hear from you. You can write to us directly.
We are car stuff and how stuff work dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, This
is how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(48:29):
you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff
works dot com.
Go behind the Wheel, under the Hood and beyond with
car Stuff from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and
welcome to Car Stuff. I'm Scott, I'm Ben. As always,
we are joined by our super producers, got uh Tristan
(00:22):
after Dark McNeil after Dark I like it, or the
midnight er Turbo Turbo Yeah, after Dark sn bad after
Dark stuff bad? So why have we given him this
nickname today? Also, folks, he doesn't really learn about these
until we're on the air. Yes, it's already too late
(00:42):
at that point, right, all right, Well, I guess it's
probably a good, uh good thing in this situation because
this so we're gonna talk about today is a little
bit of illegal street racing and it's a club that
I ran across and I don't even remember what I
was searching for. Maybe it was just looking for some photos.
I saw some unusual stick is on some cars, and
I was curious about what they what they meant and uh,
(01:03):
and it kind of led me down this this this
rabbit hole, I guess, this pathway that I didn't really
intend to go down. But it turns out there's a
great story here, and I thought it was something that
we would share with you today, and Ben, I mean you,
you've drug into this just as much as I have
now at this point. Um, this this blows my mind.
The story, this is incredible. It's hard to believe that
something like this really did exist. And it's the stuff
(01:25):
of legends, really right. And it's it's become enshrined in
pop culture as well, which is something that we'll talk
about a little bit later in the podcast. Let's set
the scene. We are talking about possibly one of the
most famous or infamous, uh illegal street racing gangs in
(01:46):
world's history. They are called I'm going to butcher the
pronunciation here. They are called meto nito. That's Japanese. That's
terrible Japanese, but I can do a decent job for
ladies and gentlemen. In English. This is called the midnight Club.
Noticed the space between mid and night. That's important, that'll
(02:07):
come up later. But this is called the midnight club.
And the midnight Club was a very exclusive group, extremely exclusive,
as we'll find out. But these guys would spend and
this is all surmised, I guess, because there's a level
of secrecy to that. We'll discuss. But um, it's it's
rumored that some of these guys were spending millions of
dollars in order to get their cars in the proper
(02:30):
shape to to racing this. I don't even want to
call it a series. It racing this gang, that, this
midnight gang, this gang that would race UM on the
streets of well around Tokyo. I should say, because they
covered great distances, vast distances in this and we're talking
about cars that we're doing. Um, should we give it away? Ben?
There they were. They were driving in excess sometimes of
(02:51):
two hundred miles per hour on city streets, city streets,
highway well highways that went through publicity roads, public roads.
That's probably the best way to say it. And um,
But the thing is, you think that would sound like, um,
like wild less type stuff, right, I mean, it's chaos,
it's got to be chaos. But that's not the case.
These guys were very, um, very strict, very regimented in
(03:13):
the way that they did things and the way that
things had to be. And they claim this is a
funny claim, the claim that you know, their own personal
safety and the public safety was there their most important
focus in this whole thing, or maybe second behind you know,
top speed of course, but Um. They claim to be very,
very safe, and up to a certain point they really were.
(03:35):
Man but you know what, we're probably like giving away
too much right here at the head. Well, let's let's
start this way, okay. Uh, let's outline their origin story
and what differentiates this organization from other street racing groups,
of which they're they're multiple in Japan, right, Yeah, they're
multiple examples. This is not the only street racing group
in Japan by a long shot. So the Midnight Club
(03:59):
formed in seven. As Scott mentioned, it is far more regimented,
one would say, elitist than many other clubs. That's one
of the first differences. But one of the other big differences.
They sort of cast derision or cast dispersion on drifting
and auto cross. They were not about that. The only
(04:20):
thing this club was about in terms of car performance
was maximum velocity. Yeah, so they wanted to sustain top
speed for as long as possible. So they needed long,
long stretches of road to do that. And it turns
out that the area right around Tokyo, um, we'll say
that it's between let's say um, I think there's a
town called Chiba and there's a town called Yokohama and
(04:43):
it goes all I mean, if you want to just
think of that area, you know, with Tokyo and between
uh Kawasaki's in there somewhere, um all the highway system
around there, but particularly that route, the route that goes
around the bay, So that areas, you know, there's a
lot of highways. There's long stretches, of course, you know,
there's straits, but there also turns. It's but it's highway,
so there's a lot of gradual turns. It's not you know,
(05:04):
like there's an abrupt right turn in there or anything.
So the area is actually not a battery. And to
do something like this, and they would do it at
night when the traffic is extremely light, if if not
non existent really in some of the areas. Um. But
they would. It was very organized in the way they
would start things up. There be three cars, you know,
two cars that were gonna race. Now they'd start to
race somewhere around you know like sixty seventy five or
(05:25):
something like that, which sounds already kind of quick, you know,
seventy but at the sound of a horn from a
third car, that's when the race would begin at a
designated spot you know, whether it's a you know line
right before you get to a long straight or whatever.
They were. There were starting points, ending points that they
knew about now at the end of the race, but
the horn honk would signal them to go, and man,
(05:45):
these guys would go. They said that the average racing
speed was somewhere around one dred and ninety miles an hour.
Again on public roads with other traffic, there's no shutdown
of you know any um you know other called civilian
I don't know, other other traffic, public traffic on these roads.
So they're they're having to deal with that. Um, I'm
sure that they got into you know, some you know
(06:07):
complications with you know, the law trying to catch them.
That's a that's a good point, Scott. I mean, obviously
one of the reasons they're driving so late at night
is to minimize the chance of encountering pedestrians, civilian drivers,
or law enforcement. Yeah. Yeah, true, But you know that
those encounters happened. But they had an advantage over those guys,
and it's that they had faster cars. We'll discuss that too.
(06:27):
So man, I think, um, so we kind of got
like the the lay of the land. I guess you know,
they're they're driving fast where they're driving around the Tokyo area,
around the Bay. Um that they would go long, long distances.
They were all about maximum velocity. Um, you know, top speed,
sustained top speed for for long long periods of time.
And you know, to be honest, the cars these guys
(06:48):
are doing this and there they will talk about them
in detail in the moment. But um, there's street cars
that were tuned, and this is what a lot of
people refer to as the Golden Era of Japanese tuning,
you know, the right in the middle of the nine nineties,
late nineties and early nineteen nineties. Um, so they're taking
cars that um, you know weren't that fast obviously from
the factory obviously. Uh you know, they'd even take you know,
(07:10):
porches and make you know, pop them up a little
bit so that you know, they were capable of two
miles an hour um and ferraris and stuff like that
at the beginning. But as this tuning era kind of
came to be in the in the nineties, uh, different
vehicles like r X seven's and supers and uh you know,
well GTRs. Of course those were high end cars. Skylines,
things like that, would would would start to enter this
mix and and be accepted by the group. Um, and
(07:33):
I guess we've we've kind of set the stage, I
guess with some some little details here and there about
what it was all about. But um, it's a fascinating
group and there's a there's a lot of secrecy. So
to participate in this group, like to to join the club,
it was an easy thing because you might think, well,
I got a nice car, it's kind of fast. But
but these guys had some standards. They had some some
(07:53):
some some certain characteristics that your car had to have
and that you had to obey in order to in
order to enter this group. So do you want to
talk a little bit about how how people would join? Yeah, sure,
let's do that, all right. So, if you wanted to
join this club, if you had heard the rumors, or
(08:14):
perhaps one day you were coming home late on traffic
you heard a distant rumble behind you and then by
the time you blinked, you saw tail lights and you
wondered who the heck was that, you would have a
lot of work ahead and some of the first stuff
you would have to do is work on your vehicle, right. Uh,
(08:37):
it has to, as Scott said, be capable of racing
over a hundred nine miles per hour or this is crazy.
So you have to I think the minimum speed that
they required it had to be able to reach one
sixty hundred sixty. But they said that the average racing
(08:58):
speed was somewhere around one. Course, they pushed that above
two hundred. I mean like two to ten is the
range they were getting into again public roads. Can you
imagine that? So yeah, it's it's something that you have
to really really work on a stock car, you know,
it comes out of the factory to get to that
kind of that kind of that kind of speed Golden
era of Japanese tuning. So let's say you managed to
(09:21):
make it to one meeting because you have dropped thousands
of dollars soup it up your car if you are
allowed to hang out with them. You are an apprentice
for at least a year, a solid year, a solid year,
and you have to attend every single meeting for a
year to show your serious about it. Yeah, but that
(09:42):
wasn't it though, right, Like if you span the whole
apprenticeship year and you make it to every event, to
every every meeting every you know, everything that they had
to do. Uh, then you you weren't assured a position
were you know, you were not. Only ten percent of
the drivers would qualify for full membership and and that
is okay. And even so even if you make it
(10:04):
into that ten percent, you have to prove that you
can handle that type of speed on public roads and
be not a Again I laugh at this, like how
can you not be a danger at that speed on
public roads? But you have to prove that you're not
a danger to the public and you're not a danger
to other racers as well at that speed you have
to be able to handle the vehicle. UM as a
(10:25):
pro would really to become a member? And so how
would they distinguish between you know, like who was an apprentice,
who was a member? Who was not in this club
at all? Because people wanted to be in there, they
wanted they wanted to claim that they were in there.
You know, there's a lot of people that um kind
of around the edge of the things, the outskirts of things,
and they want to pretend is if they're in the group,
but they're really not. Yeah, that was that was a
(10:46):
no no in this in this situation. And you know
a lot of people laugh at you know, decals, right
when you put decals on your car. They claim certain
things like you know, they put on, ah, I don't know,
an n HR a sticker on your on your street
car and then you're trying to drag race people at
the light or something, and people kind of laugh at
there or whatever. But these stickers that they distributed to members,
(11:06):
and it was a special issue sticker. You know, it
had a certain look, a certain font, certain it was
made a certain way, it had certain dimensions. All this
except no substitute. It had to be their club sticker.
If you put that on your vehicle, that meant you
were part of something and and it meant it really
did mean something. If you tried to put one of
those stickers on yourself, if you had one manufactured, if
(11:28):
you created one yourself and you tried to put that
on your vehicle and you were not a member of
the club, there were some dire um consequences to that action. Right,
your car would be vandalized, as the plight most plight
way to say, yeah, some cars were burned to the
ground because they were saying, you know, this is an
elite group. It takes a lot to be in this
(11:49):
and we, you know, put everything that we got into this.
You know, this is our this is not only our hobby,
this is it's practically our life. Really. I mean a
lot of tuners, a lot of master tuners. I guess
there and in Japan were really the end of this,
and that the peoples will find out some of the
members of these UH do own tuning shops and that's
kind of their thing. Um. But if you were trying
to pretend as if you were in this club and
you were not in the club, you would definitely pay
(12:11):
the consequences, right, and this spread their legend even further, right,
the idea that essentially the secret society existed in the
heart of Japan UH and would take vengeance upon those
who disobeyed its rules. You know this this concept, I
(12:34):
guess the best the way I guess the best way
to say it is it fascinated the public, and UH
and racing fans in other countries as well began to
hear about this, but very few people actually made it
to a meeting because it was really you had to
know what you were looking for to even make it
to a meeting. I mean, it was it was a
(12:55):
chance occurrence. If you even saw these guys on the
road or at at a bus stops them or a
truck stop or whatever on the side of the road,
it was like, you know, they met at certain times
at certain places, but they're passing by two d miles
an hour, and you don't know where they're gonna stop
and where they're gonna start, and you know where the
meetup is happening. It's all very secretive. The whole thing
(13:16):
is based on secrecy. Like they were such a tight group.
They didn't want everybody to be involved. I didn't want
you know, uh spectators to uh, you know, be in
the way of things. I guess, yeah, I didn't want
the cops to know. So I guess the only way
that you would really um, you know, happened across these
guys is just by chance or by a careful reading
(13:38):
of the newspaper. Yeah, this is clever. I like my
favorite part. Yeah, So let's let's hear the way that
they would organize these meetups because even to the members, uh,
they didn't know what was going on going on until
I guess maybe last minute, right, I mean, the week
before to organize a meet up. The leader of the
team would place an AD in a local newspaper in Tokyo,
(14:00):
under which they're you know, there are there are many yeah,
and it would be in the classified section, and it
wouldn't sound like a racing meeting at all. Instead, it's
the subject of the ad. The you know, the ostensible
subject of the AD would be something that the group
had decided on at their previous meeting, so by word
(14:20):
of mouth essentially, So you only know about this if
somebody told you or if you were at that meeting.
And then the team members could look up the AD
and the ad would tell them the location to begin
the race at the exact time. So an example of
the ad, we have an example of it. What what
would it read like? I would say something like, you know,
(14:41):
small handbags at discount prices for more information, I'm available
for meet up at the de Kou parking area on
Thursday between eleven pm and two am, thank you, And
so it would have nothing to do with racing, but
it would say the name of the place, the day
and the time, and it would be between eleven and
two am. And you, of course they're they all know
(15:01):
exactly when to go you know it's one am or whatever,
it's gonna be one am at this parking or they
wouldn't tell them where, uh that would be the location
that's given to them there. But they hide it in
these ads that you know, pretend to be as if
you know, they're selling discount handbags or you know, something
that is just something that no one would ever look
twice at unless somebody happen to want to discount handbag.
(15:21):
I guess maybe, And then it happened across run across
this group. But you know, one thing, Ben, we're talking
about secrecy, and we didn't mention this in the Apprentice
thing that um or during during the Yeah, I guess
when you're talking about the Apprentice, it was a very
limited group. I mean we're talking like I think at
one point membership swelled to something like seventy five members,
(15:42):
but it was like thirty around. There was about the
average for all the years that this was in existence,
and so it remained a tight group. And the secrecy thing,
it goes even farther than you might think because they
were so careful about not feeling who they are, what
they did, or what you know, the cars were about
or anything that they didn't even tell each other what
(16:05):
was going on. Really, you couldn't ask questions if you
were in the group. It was one of those strict
rules again, these rules and regulations through this whole series
or group or club that you couldn't even tell other
members anything about your car. You couldn't tell them how
you were funding the vehicle, you know, how you were
able to spend in one of the case, two million
(16:26):
dollars on his car, two million on a car to
make it go you know, two twenty miles or whatever
it was. Um, you couldn't talk about where you worked,
You couldn't talk about anything how you were funding your
racing effort, or what you did during the day. It's
just it was it was an absolute no and it
was forbidden to talk about once you were remember this group,
So secrecy was a was a big, big issue with them.
(16:49):
They maintain that throughout the whole run of the club
and uh and it just kind of it trickles into
every little thing that they do. You'll see it, you know,
come up later as well. Um, it's a fight club
for cars. Yeah. And you might think, okay, well, why
don't you know, you gotta believe that police are just
kind of hanging out waiting for these guys to pass
that they're going to um. You know, they're gonna just
(17:11):
set up traps because they know that invariably they're gonna
meet they're gonna meet up with these guys, will just
be able to to to nab them, you know, like
watching them come by, or you know, you're not faster
than the radio, so they're going to catch them. Right.
Didn't quite work out that way for the police because
there was something called the gentleman's agreement or a gentleman's agreement,
and I think we should come back and talk about
(17:32):
that after a word from our sponsor, and we have
returned a gentleman's agreement to say yes, yeah, yeah, And
this is in particular one that well, actually there's two
(17:53):
parts of this and this is a bit of a sidebar,
but gentleman's agreement comes up in a lot of different things.
It's not just it's not just the one we're gonna
talk about today. So the one that in the one
in particular that that hampered the police was something called
the nineteen seventy seven Japanese Automotive Gentleman's Agreement. And this
this is crazy. This limited the police vehicles and supposedly
(18:17):
all the the the civilian vehicles, you know, the public
vehicles to a top speed of one dred and ten
miles per hour or one eighty kilometers per hour, which
was a legal requirement. I guess legal. I'm doing the
air quote thing set forth by this nineteen seventy seven
Japanese Automotive Gentleman's Agreement. And so the police are driving
(18:37):
around in these cars that can't go above a hundred
and ten miles per hour. These guys go was in
past at two hundred miles an hour. Really not a chance. Yeah,
And by the time they get the radio coordination to
get them down the road, there's still no chance of
catching them trying to catch up to a motorcycle from
a dead stop. Yeah. And if the thing is this
(19:00):
is this this was set about because of a okay,
two parts of this, as I said, and I'll try
to get through this in the most clear way possible.
But the nine agreement was really um all about the
Bossasuku guys. Remember the old Bossasuku guys that we talked about,
the bike gangs, and they I think they had cars
(19:21):
also at some point. But It started out with motorcycles.
So the idea was that, you know that the Japan
Automobile Manufacturers Association or JAMA j m a UH suggested
that the speed limiting devices be put into all vehicles.
We're talking about motorcycles and cars, and the top speed
(19:41):
was gonna be one and ten miles per hour because
the Bossasuku guys and girls were causing a lot of
chaos on the road. They're causing some havoc because they
were they were all about stirring up um, stirring up
trouble everywhere. Really, I mean, doesn't the name I don't
have the name somewhere. I think it means Bossasuku, means
violent speed tribes and so you can understand that. Well,
(20:01):
I'll go back and listen to the car stuff episode
on that. We did that then went January of I
think it was, and the idea was that, you know,
if if everybody did this, if all manufacturers supported this idea,
and they did because they wanted to rid the town
of this, you know, this this uh, this chaos. So
they said, well, let's make it so that no vehicle
(20:21):
can go above a hundred and ten miles per hour.
And it actually worked. It worked for a while until
you know groups like you know the bosses, Well, the
Bossasuku guys were able to to bypass all that stuff
with tuning, and so were the car um well, the
car guys, I guess the Midnight Club and you know
other clubs like it. Again, Bossasuku wasn't just motorcycles, it
was also cars. But this gentleman's agreement that came about
(20:43):
in seventy seven was not the only one that happened.
There was another one that came about in nine, which
is also during the time frame that we're talking about here,
because um, this group started in nine seven. In nine,
there was a another agreement in the automotive industry, and uh,
this was between all Japanese manufacturers that agreed that no
(21:06):
production car would have more than two hundred and seventy
six horsepower. Um so the agreement. While the agreement ended
in two thousand fives, we'll find out in a moment.
But um, the whole idea behind these these gentlemen's agreements
is that it's not really illegally, it's not a legally
binding thing. It's it's just an agreement, a handshake, you
know that that does this, it's like an understanding. Yeah,
(21:28):
it's it's on your honor. You know. It's like, you know,
we we say we're not going to do this, and
therefore we're not going to do this. And if everybody
adheres to that, it works. It's like, um, it just it.
It fulfills itself that way. I mean that you know,
no one it doesn't have to be enforced because everybody
just does it. Right. So all these manufacturers had agreed
to these speed limiting devices back in the seventies. Now
(21:51):
top horse power ratings would be two and seventy six,
and they said that, you know, the reason was because
you know, this is a country where the maximum speed
limit is is sixty two miles per hour. Youwhere in
the country you can't go faster than that, So why
not just adhere to this and that will work. So
all the advertising and everything you'll see from that era
up until about two thousand five, we'll say that you know,
if it's I it's a high end vehicle, you know,
(22:12):
something that's you know G t R or something like that,
or you know one of the superbut cars like a
w r X. From prior to two thousand five, it's
going to say it has two D and seventy six
horse power, and I've seen other numbers that say to eighties,
so you might see it as high as to eighty,
but right around that area. Even though it's kind of
everybody you know, gave a wink and a nod that
you know, we know this car is three horse power
(22:34):
or whatever it is, but we for advertising purposes say
two D seventy six horse power horse power, And it's
just kind of the way it went for a long
time until Accura or Honda, I guess debut the legend
uh in I believe it was. I think it's just
said two thousand five, right, and it was with a
three point five leader V six uh legend or I
(22:55):
think it's the r R L here in the US
that had three hundred horse power, and they just outright
of just blew it. They just said, you know, that's it,
We're done with this this agreement. And then right after
that it was kind of like the floodgates opened up
and everybody else started, you know, saying, well, you know,
well we've got this NSX. Also, look, our stat's again accurate,
but um, it's a bad example there. But um, the
RX seven came out, you know, with Mazda, and they said, well,
(23:17):
we've got a three hundred horse power to set r
X seven that's coming out. Um, I think there were
you know. Of course NSX came out with a four
hundred horse power version. Lexis had a three hundred horse
power vehicles soon after. So as soon as they did it,
you know, the advertising changed. And it's not so much
that the they really were doing anything different. They were
just finally admitting to the public we have we've been
building these cars that have more than that, but we've
(23:39):
been adhering to this. I guess we'll call it a
silly gentleman's agreement up until this point. It wasn't silly
to begin with, but everybody knew how to get around it.
And of course the gangs like you know, the Midnight
Club and the Bossasuku guys, they knew how to get
it around it early on as well, but they were
the ones flaunting it. There wasn't the manufacturers that we're
doing it up until oh five, Um, these guys as
(24:00):
we're doing it right in the middle of the agreement
when it was supposed to be limited, and the and
the cops were adhering to it, and that was the problem.
They weren't allowed to do anything different. And finally, I
think somebody said, we need to we need to get
the equipment out on the streets to be able to
catch these guys. So they did up the police car
horsepower and and you know, get some hotter vehicles out
there so they could catch these guys or at least
(24:21):
keep up with them. So it becomes an escalating arms
relative sort Yeah. And I know that's a long description
of it, but you had to understand that, like why
they felt they could get away with it, and why
they did get away with it for so long, and
and part of partially why they were allowed to do
so for so long, because this could have changed much earlier.
But the fact that the public and law enforcement seemed
(24:46):
to acknowledge the midnight clubs high prioritization of safety like
that had an immense influence on the timing of the
agreement laps well. The public kind of they revered them
for this. They said, well, you know, this is a
group that actually it's not like the Boss soup of
(25:08):
guys that are out there just causing chaos and you know,
like smacking the back window of my car as they
arrived by it, you know, a hundred and twenty miles
an hour or whatever, uh, you know, with a bat
or something. Because they were doing they were causing all
kinds of trouble, these guys, and they were just like
swarming around vehicles and you know, nearly causing accidents, if
not causing accidents, Um, just general chaos. Really you can
imagine just again, listen to that episode. You'll hear it.
(25:30):
But um, these guys were more about you know, they're sure,
they're they're going dangerously fast and you gotta watch for them,
I suppose. But a hundred and ninety miles an hour,
two hundred miles an hour, you don't get much of
a chance to react to a car that you see
in first in your rear view mirror and then it's gone,
you know, then it's it's beyond your your line of
sight in front of you. Um, so you know, if
(25:50):
you just maintain what you're doing, they're gonna go around you.
They know that these guys are I guess if I
want to say, say I keep stumbling and when I
say safe enough, but it again two in a public road,
that's it's hard to fathom, but it happens. Um, I
guess they trusted them enough to say, yeah they can,
they can maneuver these roads safe enough. So I feel
(26:11):
safe around those guys and not around this other group.
Let's look at some of the specific vehicles to sure, right,
let's get in, let's dig into the good stuff. So
we talked about let's let the badger out of the
bag here, my friend. We talked about that vehicle that
had over two million dollars worth of mods and rebuilding
(26:34):
on it. What was the Blackbird? Yeah, this one was
a it's a portion of nine thirty. It's in a
nine eleven turbo and insanely fast, I mean insanely fast.
And if you want to look it up, I mean
you can. You can search for an article called there's
actually a really good article on just this one vehicle
and finding this car. Now. Um, it's called finding the
(26:56):
Midnight Racing nine thirty and it's in speed Hunters if
you want to get a good run. I know what
that cars all about. But um, this is the Yoshida
Specials nine thirty, which is a maroon colored nine eleven.
Um again rumored that there was what two million dollars
put into this week in order to make it go
faster than another portion that had set this record, a
speed record called the Yellow Bird, I think, and I
(27:17):
don't have the details on the Yellow Bird right now,
that's a different podcast. But um, you know there were
cars like you know, this this Blackbird, and there were
other cars that had names like that. But you know
we're talking about early on in this series. There are
serious to keep contact. But the group of Club Gang, uh,
there were Portion nine eleven's, there were Ferraris, other supercars,
you know, similar high dollar sports cars like that. But
(27:39):
then the tuner cars came in, you know, with with
the lower end vehicles that had just dumped a pile
of money into the engine development and you know, making
them lightweight and safer for the right driver. But we're
talking about again like Supras and GTRs and um skylines.
I think we're in there. Arc seven's just you name
the Japanese manufacturer it was in on this in the
(28:00):
midnight club in some way. Really, Um, you know there's
somebody there to tune it and make it better and
and somehow get it up two hundred and sixty miles
an hour minimum, if not up to two hundred two
hundred plus insane. And again, nobody knows. Nobody except for
this guy knows how he was able to channel this
much money into this. Well, there's other people that know,
(28:22):
but they're not talking. See that's the secret. That's the
beauty of the secrecy thing is that there are people
out there that will do this stuff and they just
will keep tight lipped about it. They don't have to
brag about it. They don't have to talk about they
they know what they were capable of doing, or what
they helped them, what they helped him do he himself.
I believe the person that owns this vehicle, I believe
is a tuner. So a lot of that work is
(28:43):
probably done in the house, but it takes a lot
of work. There's a lot of collaboration that goes on
to make a car go this fast. And they also
they would sometimes practice at a track, a local track
I think, and it was like a superspeedway almost really.
It was a huge bank turn track and you'll see
a lot of toographs us of these midnight vehicles, I
mean that midnight club vehicles on this, uh the superspeedway.
(29:06):
And this is owned by a guy that would allow
them to go out and I guess give it to
give a little bit of shakedown. Um. And the track
was called and I'll probably blow the pronunciation of this,
but it's your tobby test track, I think it was.
And this is they would sometimes reach, you know again,
almost two miles an hour on this track. It's a
high banked, you know, steep incline, banking on the on
(29:28):
the turns. And unfortunately the track was demolished so it's
not around anymore. I think the the guy that owned
the track, his name is Masa Saito. And after well, shoot,
I'm gonna get into the history of what happened here
in a moment, but um, he died later on, I think,
and like I want to say, in the early two thousand's,
(29:49):
you know what's got that's this is a perfect time
for us to introduce a plot twist because we've talked
a lot about the formation of the club, it's rules,
its rivalries, but we have yet to talk about the
current state of the Midnight Racing Team. And we will
(30:10):
scoot to the edge of your seats, ladies and gentlemen,
unless it's gonna you know, mess up. You're driving and
we'll be back after a word from our responsible and
we're back in Benue tease that we were going to
hear about the current state of the Midnight Racing Club. Now,
(30:32):
what's going on with him right now? Nothing? They're gone. Well,
they are the official organization, the official secret society no
longer exists. And due to the nature of secrecy in
this organization, the former members are not going to talk
about it now. But we know what happened. There is
(30:55):
a specific event that happened in and they immediately disbanded
after that. UM. This event, this, this occurrence is something
that again this is part of why people UM actually
gave them quite a bit of credit. They said, you know,
this is this is a group that six to what
they say, they mean what they say, they say what
they mean, and they did they really did this. So
(31:16):
what happened was in there was a group of racers
that are out on the street at the Midnight Racing Club.
They're out there as they do here, doing their rivalries
in a safe professional way. And as we said, you know,
the Boss Suku guys were also out on the roads
at that time and they had a bit of a
rivalry going. Of course, you know, because you know, well,
who's faster that kind of thing. They're caused in trouble
(31:37):
for each other. Theku ambush them, they were waiting for them. Yeah,
so they're waiting for these guys to pass because you
know they're they're again they create chaos everywhere they go,
these boss of Suku guys, or at least they did.
I don't know if the current ones still do. Um,
but this is this happened in again in nineteen. There's
three am, around three am, and the Bossuku the bikers
(31:58):
have been drinking. Yeah, so there's a drunk bike ride
around the road and he's gone really fast, I mean
like a hundred and sixty miles an hour fast. So
he's driving recklessly. This this uh, this biker, this Bossasuku
driver biker rather, and he's driving recklessly down the road
and he's scaring all these other drivers you know, on
the road because he's driving so fast and again you know,
(32:19):
kind of swerving in and out of his lane and
just causing him again just general chaos really and that's
a very uh. This leads just to a very important part.
So remember how he said that they would meet up.
I get the feeling they didn't confirm this bike get
the feeling they had mapped out commonly understood roots, but
the bikers aren't going to know what those routes are.
(32:40):
So when a member of the club accepts challenge from
a biker and they're just racing each other on an
unplanned route, accidents happen. They deviate from the roads that
they usually or the roads that they were planning to
use that evening. They accidentally enter a high traffic area, Yeah,
the high train araphic area. And remember they're going to
(33:01):
one hundred and sixty approximately a hundred and sixty at
this time. So the bus super writer loses control, hits
the motorist and causes this huge chain reaction crash. Uh. Now,
the motorists crashes into the barricade and he died instantly. Unfortunately, Um,
the midnight club racers slowed down, you know, because they
saw what was going they saw the traffic, you know,
(33:22):
I realized that they need to back down a bit. Um.
And the bus super writer, of course, he perished as
well in this crash because you know, he caused the
initial accident. So two people dead right there. Eight other
motorists were hospitalized. Um, they you know, the group itself
had a policy that they had said in place long
before this, like we're in the very inception of the
(33:44):
club back in the late eighties. Uh, they said that, um,
if ever it happened, that you know, if anyone was
to die in the existence of the club, whether it's
a racer or a motorist or was you know, indirect
or directly the club's fault, this whole group would disband.
That would be the end of the whole thing immediately
and forever. Yeah, and they did that. They did exactly that.
(34:05):
So you know, this was the first instance that it happened.
And of course it was caused by you know, it
doesn't matter that it wasn't caused by a midnight club racer,
was caused by the Bussuku guy, you know, initiating this
whole thing. And you know they went into this this
wrong the wrong area, but they were involved. They were involved,
that's right. There's no I mean, you still can point
fingers in this case because you know, there's still it's
still in a legal street racing gang, so that you know,
(34:26):
there's that aspect to it. Um. But they did hold
to their word and they disbanded immediately, and that was it.
They just it's like one of those things. They never
talked about it again. And the members that were in
the club then and have been in the club, you know,
throughout the history of it, from all the way through,
was said, Uh, they are very tight lipped about it.
(34:47):
Now there's a few people that, you know, we'll say, yeah,
I was in the club, and you know, here's my
old car and it's still got stickers on it and
it's verified as an original you know, midnight club racer.
But they just won't talk about they want talk about
other members. They just don't feel comfortable sharing a whole
lot about their experience in this club. It's it's very secretive,
right to the very end and right to today. Right
(35:09):
we can, however, connect the dots, we can string together
some clues. There's very very compelling evidence that a lot
of founders of famous Japanese tuning shops were members, and
that just comes from that comes from a couple of sources.
There are confirmed statements which are few and far between,
(35:31):
but like Scott said, there are they are out there
if you want to check. And then there are histories
of cars that have been seen racing suring that time period.
And have the sticker and then exclusively go to one
tuning shop or another to get worked on. Makes perfect sense,
doesn't it that you know, the the owners of these
tuning shops would be the guys that were in on
(35:52):
the ground floor of this, because that was again, this
is the beginning really of the Japanese not the very beginning,
but it's really the a day, the golden era of
Japanese street car tuning, And it makes sense that the
guys that were involved in this, you know the ones that, um,
they were in on the ground floor, the ones that
were the originators of the series and had these extremely
(36:13):
expensive cars that had you know, the best of the
best at the time. Uh, you know that they were
the top end of everything. Um, they were the ones
that you know, still own the vehicles. They still keep
them in the back of the shop. They're covering under
you know, a tarp maybe but or they're you know,
they're on display, but not maybe out in the front window.
You know, they're in the they're in the back tucked
in behind you know five other cars that you know,
(36:34):
you can't really see it unless you make an attempt
to go back and see it, or they're in like
these wooden crates. Uh, like where they put the Ark
of the Covenant at the Indiana Jones spoiler alert and
stamped on it it says top secret street race your
car spoiler alert. Isn't it like years older this? You know,
it's weird about it, Like is it? Is it a
(36:54):
spoiler to say that, uh, Abraham Lincoln didn't make it
all the way through his term? Wait? What, Ben? How
can you ruin something like that? I'm sorry that I
know you were watching that documenty minary series. Yea, now
I know what's going to happen. Great, Yeah, it's like
(37:14):
when I ruined the Titanic for people, Wait, something happened.
It's just a romantic comedy, alright, But honestly, it does.
It does make sense that you know, the guys that
we know were involved in this were involved in and
you can put the pieces together. I assume that you
know that's that's accurate. But to get those guys to really,
(37:34):
you know, to expel expound on that, you know, that's
to say, like, you know, here's here's what happened, here's
the way everything worked. They're not going to do that.
They're not going to also talk about you know exactly
what they had done to their cars, and and what
you know the other person had done to their vehicles,
even though they saw it. They never really we're comfortable
discussing that with anybody with and to a degree, I
can understand why, even just beyond the secrecy um, the
(37:58):
fact that people could feel and in any way complicit
in injury or death of someone else, you know, it
weighs on you, even if you weren't one of the
people in the car. Sure, so I can understand hesitancy
to talk about it even without the secrecy. This would
make for a fantastic documentary. And we mentioned at the
(38:21):
top of the show that this has become a incredibly
influential organization, I guess posthumously right after it's disbanding. It
inspired numerous other street racing groups yea, even some called
the Midnight Club, which which I wouldn't mess with. I
(38:44):
would not either, But you know, it's so far, so good,
I guess, I mean, but they're there. I don't want
to say cheap imitations, but there are imitations that don't
quite live up to the standards of the original, I guess,
and and even even the way it's written as different,
and there's not there's not the space between mid and
night to it's it's together. But they try to emulate
everything about the club and do things in the same way,
(39:05):
but it's just not exactly the same. Well, they might
be on a budget, man, you know, looking at some
of the cars, you know, these Japanese tuner cars that
we see today that are trying to be like these
midnight clubs or even you know they name them other things,
but illegal street racing groups, you know, the incredible Vegle.
I don't think they're on a budget at all when
you take a look look at what they've got it.
(39:25):
I mean, they're they're some of them are pretty wacky,
you know what they do, and a lot of led
lighting and stuff like that, like aesthetic rather than performance. Yeah,
and these guys again we're just about like just paired
down performance. I mean, it was like the cars looked
rather plain if you want to, if you can call
them that. I mean they had some minor things that
you know, allowed them to stick to the ground a
little bit better, you know, some arrow improvements, but for
(39:46):
the most part they were taking stuff off of their
car to make it lighter and faster and slicker through
the air. So the cars you'll see from the original
group are a little bit uh and I wouldn't. They're
not disappointing. I mean, they're really cool cars. It's just
they don't look like the modern cars that you know,
can are capable of achieving two hundred miles an hour UM.
And again, these guys would do this for you know,
(40:07):
twenty minute runs at a time. They're going two hundred
miles an hour. There's not a lot of you know,
modern day supercars that can do that. So I give
them a lot of credit for being able to do
what they did when they did it. And and that's
one other little I guess a facet of the story
that I find really fascinating is that you can't you
can't find a lot of footage of these cars on
(40:27):
the on the road. In fact, it's it's almost impossible
to find more than just a few seconds. I think
there's a a YouTube video that has maybe thirty seconds
of footage, you know, the shot with like a grainy
VHS recorder back in the nineties of these guys driving
on again a public road at two hundred miles an
hour UM. But the reason for this and I was thinking, like,
(40:49):
why are there so few videos and even photos. There's
a there's a lot of photos of just the cars themselves,
but not of them really in action. And the reason
is because you got to think of the time. This
was late to nighties, you know, all the way through
the not everybody had a way to capture what was happening,
you know, on hand, like we do now. It doesn't
(41:09):
you don't just pull out the device from your pocket
and shoot a little video. You had to bring out
the big VHS camcorder and put it on your shoulder
and shoot it. And if you didn't know where these
guys were going to be or where you know, when
they were going to pass, the opportunity was over. You
couldn't like, you know, keep it with you and then
just jump in the back of the van and then
you know, try to try to capture this. It wasn't
that way. You didn't you didn't have an iPhone in
(41:31):
your pocket. So even photographs, if you were lucky enough
to snap some photographs of these things, um, there's a
good chance that the people that you know, we're old
enough to do that in and you know, there's a
good chance that they don't really have a reliable way
to put those photos online today. So there's probably a
(41:51):
lot of them. They're just kind of hanging out in
a scrap books somewhere or in you know someone's uh,
you know, toolbox in the garage. Some great photographs but
there's just no way to get them online. There is,
but they don't know how to do it, or you know,
have no wasting or no interest in doing it. Yeah. Right,
So but to have that scrap book, Yeah, I know
that's probably again an over explanation of of what's going on,
(42:12):
But you gotta remember because I've been trying to trying
desperately to find to find footage of these guys on
the road in you know, from the ninety nineties, and
it's really really hard. Um, you can find again that
thirty second clip I think in this YouTube video and
that's about it. But um, you can find modern vehicles
that are you know, pushing the limits of two hundred
miles an hour on the highway and you'll see you know,
(42:34):
a little one minute videos of acceleration, you know, like
from you know sixty two to two and ten or
whatever it is, you know, in a in a corvette
that has d horsepower. But it's not the same as
seeing these guys do their thing, you know, in the
middle of Tokyo in the middle of the night. Uh,
you know what, years ago. You're right, And this is
where we get to one of the most important parts
(42:56):
of today's episode. Ladies and gentlemen, On the off chance
that you happen to have any knowledge first or second
hand of this club, of the midnight Club, let us know.
You can write to us directly, and if frankly, usually
we asked for you to write to us and tell
(43:20):
us something that you think we should share with your
fellow listeners. At this point, Scott, you know, I've been
doing a lot of a lot of digging and listening
to what you said because there's not a lot of
info out there. So at this point, if you wouldn't
just give me an inside scoop, I promise I won't
tell anybody. No. I okay, I'll probably tell Scott, but
(43:43):
I won't tell anybody else. I am just so so
baffled by the the success of their secrecy, you know, yeah,
how it lasted for so long. I mean we're now
eighteen years after the culmination of this, this whole thing.
I mean it ended in. People are still tight lipped
(44:05):
about it. I mean they know they were in there,
you know they're in the group, but they're just not
saying anything about it. I mean a little bits and
pieces here and there, just to get you, you know,
just get you hooked, I guess. And I even saw
somewhere there's a forum and that you'll you'll run across
stuff like this if you're digging into the midnight club,
and I encourage you to do it because some really
interesting stories about individual cars are out there too. Again
that that finding uh you know the Blackbird or the
(44:27):
nine thirty, the portion nine thirty, that story is pretty fascinating.
But you'll, you'll you run across things that like people
who claim to have an inside scoop on um you
know what's going on. And one person and one of
these one of these forums that I was and they
claimed to be kind of tight with you know, some
of the original members and said that every year they
still have an annual meetup that uh, you know, some
(44:48):
of the original members come back and meet up in
a in a designated spot and still kind of do
this a little bit. I don't know if they make
an actual run but they still have an annual meet
up somewhere and again completely secret, no one really knows
about it. But this guy is spelling the beans that
you know, it happens. And I don't even know if
you can you trust that though. I mean, is that
somebody just kind of you know, being Mr big Stuff
(45:09):
on a forum somewhere, you know, right, yeah, an internet
tough guy. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean like bragging
like you know, it's you know, like making people assume
that he knows more than he really does. Know. You know,
There's a lot of people that do that kind of thing,
and I feel like this might be one of those cases.
So I don't I don't know. I mean again, you
wouldn't know unless you happened across this group of people
(45:30):
that gathered, you know, at at a truck stop or
a um, you know. I just I don't know where
they would gather really, I mean it could be anywhere,
could be a racetrack somewhere, who knows. Again, secrecy, you
might know. And again, if you want to write to me,
I promise I won't even show up. I'll just read
about it. I just want to get it. I just
want to get an inside view of this, it's I mean,
(45:55):
to be honest, this is one of the more intriguing
stories that we've run across in the last couple of months.
I know that, you know, we're constantly looking for new
topics and things, but I really dug into this one,
and I don't even know if I was able to
convey enough how um, I'm just jo how fascinating this
series is. And I even I keep calling this series,
how how fascinating this gang was? And uh, and I
(46:16):
just want to know more and more about it. But
the problem is there's a limit. There's there's only so
much out there, and beyond traveling to Tokyo and starting
to do some some real journalism, some real digging around,
some real you know, detective work, you're not gonna find
out a whole lot more. You just have to go
with the bits and pieces that are online right now,
spot On, and we hope that you have enjoyed this
episode at least half as much as we've enjoyed trying
(46:39):
to dig through what information is out there. We also
hope that this functions as you know, the entrance to
the rabbit hole for you, right yeah, the first step, yep,
and it is a rabbit hole because you'll you'll start
to find little baits and bits and pieces here and there,
and uh and dig around the forums like I did,
and then you'll start looking up things like the Gentleman's
(47:01):
Agreement and uh read about you know, j d M culture,
I guess you know, the Japanese domestic market um tuning,
you know, and the golden era of tuning and you
know what what that was all about. And it just
seems like there's a lot of different, really interesting side
stories to this whole thing. It's not just the gang
itself and not just what they did, but everything is
surrounding it. It's really interesting and you can find you know,
(47:26):
it might be worth our time to uh post a
couple of pictures maybe of the blackbird on our social
media where you can find us at Facebook and Twitter.
We are car Stuff HSW on both of those and
you can write to us directly if you have a
lead for me, or you know, I feel like that's
(47:48):
a long shot, or you have some thoughts on street
racing in general, right because this is sometimes a controversial topic. Right,
So do you think are you, as we used to
always say, are you for it? Or again it. Do
you participate in street racing? And you know we're not
(48:08):
recommending that anybody break any laws, but if you have
a story you think your fellow listeners would enjoy, we'd
love to hear from you. You can write to us directly.
We are car stuff and how stuff work dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, This
is how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(48:29):
you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff
works dot com.
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