Part of the joy in any hobby is finding community, and that’s especially true when you’re into cars. Whether you’re into motorsports, muscle cars, trucks, European sports sedans, sports cars, restorations, or stance builds sitting low on fancy wheels, your people are out there, and sometimes it’s wonderful to meet them at car shows and other events. In that vein, Slammedenuff Sevierville—formerly known as Slammedenuff Gatlinburg and informally known as Gat—has long been the pilgrimage for stance culture on the East Coast, a gathering showing off neat builds in Sevierville, Tenn. that draws people from far and wide. Unfortunately, due to actions around this year’s event, it doesn’t look like it will be happening any longer.
This year, things were different. In hindsight, one could’ve predicted that this would be the biggest Slammedenuff Sevierville yet, but it was hard to predict just how far south things would go when the evening of Oct. 4 rolled around. After the sun went down, the powder keg seemed to ignite in the parking lot of Jimmy’s Market & Grill, a privately owned service station in Pigeon Forge that’s previously welcomed small, low-key gatherings. This year was anything but small and low-key. Videos circulating on social media show people overrunning the spot, with the sort of chaos erupting that understandably required a police response.
Fair warning, the Instagram reel below does show a fight that happened at Jimmy’s on Saturday night, along with language you probably shouldn’t play through a speaker in a public environment. There’s no excuse for this sort of behavior to happen around an automotive event; it makes the whole scene look bad.
View this post on Instagram
Mind you, the above scuffle seemed relatively quiet compared to some of the nuisance behavior on display. Burnouts, people climbing on buildings, drivers bouncing their cars off the rev limiters, the sort of stuff that’s likely to draw negative attention from both law enforcement and members of the public, even if they aren’t directly in the line of sight.
View this post on Instagram
But wait, there’s more. In other found footage, police appear to seize a weapon removed from a Nissan Skyline, and two Lamborghinis appear to have a street race up the strip. It costs zero dollars for people to just not do stuff like this, so there’s really no excuse for it.
View this post on Instagram
Unsurprisingly, this all resulted in quite a large police response. Squad cars, crowd control vehicles, even helicopters were called out to manage the crowds, displace them from places like Jimmy’s Market, and attempt to put a lid on the situation. As local news WBIR reports, displacing the crowds required multiple attempts.
Pigeon Forge Police Chief Richard Catlett said officers were called out several times to clear the parking lot. He said each time police asked the crowd to leave, they would come back even bigger.
Unsurprisingly, the efforts of law enforcement on Saturday night weren’t just focused on the crowd at Jimmy’s. As WBIR reported:
Police also said there were reports of a stabbing, but the injury sustained by a person did not occur at Jimmy’s Market. The person who said they were stabbed had a “minor” wound, and declined to be transported to a hospital by an ambulance.
Once a credible report of a stabbing surfaces, it’s probably a good time to make people leave. On Sunday morning, the Sevierville Police Department issued the following statement, which we also received after reaching out to the department for comment:
The City of Sevierville has made the decision to cancel the Sunday portion of the Slammedenuff car show scheduled at the Sevierville Convention Center. This decision follows numerous disturbances, safety concerns, and a significant strain on County-wide public resources directly related to activities surrounding this weekend’s event.
While the event itself is privately organized, the impacts on our community, ranging from traffic disruptions and reckless behavior to late-night noise and public safety challenges, have reached a level that is no longer acceptable or sustainable. The City has an obligation to protect the safety, peace, and welfare of our residents, visitors, and businesses.
Effective immediately, we are implementing a zero-tolerance policy for any nuisance activity, unsafe driving, or disorderly conduct associated with this event or similar gatherings. Violations will be met with full enforcement of all applicable laws and ordinances.
Individuals currently in Sevierville or the surrounding areas for the Slammedenuff event are strongly urged to vacate in an orderly and lawful manner.
The City will be conducting a comprehensive review of the event’s overall impact and will reevaluate its future viability at the Sevierville Convention Center. Any continuation of this event will depend entirely on significant and verifiable improvements in conduct and management.
We appreciate the understanding of our residents, guests, and business community as we act decisively to maintain safety, order, and the quality of life that Sevierville is known for.
Yep, day two of Slammenuff Sevierville was cancelled, understandably so. There was no room for this chaos to potentially go on for a second night, and even though it was unaffiliated with the formal show itself, it was inextricably linked to it, as the popularity of the formal show was part of the draw for these bad actors. Shortly after news of the cancellation broke, Slammedenuff issued a statement on Instagram:
The owners and staff of Slammedenuff do not in any way condone the actions that happened on the streets in the areas surrounding pigeon forge last night. We have always promoted a safe, fun, and friendly environment both in and outside of our shows. We urge the utmost respect to any city we host a show in, and hope our spectators and show participants will always do the same. There is no confirmation or evidence that the worst of the actions were perpetrated by individuals in town for our specific event or that they were even going to the show.
Last nights events are an embarrassment to the car community, and are the exact reason that events like ours are no longer welcome in a lot of areas.
The blatant lack of respect for law enforcement, private property and other people has taken away something we have worked to build and grow over the last 9 years.To our vendors, participants and spectators; we are sincerely sorry that the actions of others stopped us from being able to open the doors to the Sevierville convention center to you all today. We hope you all have a safe trip back to your homes.
We will be working diligently with the city of Sevierville to find a way around what has happened so that we can continue this long standing tradition.
If you were a part of last nights “festivities” you are not what the car community needs, and you are not a true enthusiast. You are a cancer to automotive enthusiasts everywhere. We do not need or want you at our events, and hope that you one day realize what you’re doing to the others who truly share this passion.
Harsh words, but fair, especially given what came shortly after. On Monday, City of Sevierville Alderman Joey Ohman announced on Facebook that “The Slammedenuff car show will NOT be coming back to Sevierville in the future.” Another long-running car show dead because people couldn’t behave.
While it’s easy to go online and see people pointing fingers at takeover kids, much of the bedlam seen online goes beyond that. From supercars filmed street racing to badly-behaved bikers to the aforementioned building-scalers, there isn’t one demographic to blame for this insanity, but rather, one group of behaviors. The same sort of acts that led to the cancellation of car shows like Southern Worthersee for 2016 and Ocean City-based H20i in 2019.
So what incentivizes people to act out like this? Attention might be a motivator. Videos capturing the mayhem on social media often have hundreds, if not thousands, of likes. If there’s a dopamine hit to be had from that, chances are some people will chase it. Granted, we can diagnose until the cows come home, but the real trick lies in prescribing so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to your favorite local car event. Let’s use the example of owning a bar here: You’d love to let everyone in, but if you let in people who are only there to pick fights, pretty soon people won’t want to come to your bar and the place will attract some police attention.
As such, to ensure the bar continues to be a place nice people want to go, you’ll need to eject the punch-up types. Likewise, if the car community sees anyone bouncing their car off the rev limiter, ripping burnouts, or just generally acting a fool in a place where it’s not appreciated, it’s the community’s duty to kick the offending party out of not just formal car shows, but any gatherings.
If we don’t put a stop to reckless behavior in the community, we’ll likely end up with a significantly smaller number of events left to attend, which would make the hobby worse for everyone. The more actual illegal behavior is tolerated around car shows, the more likely people are to think of us as nuisances, or worse, criminals, even if we’re being respectful, minding our own business, and taking care to be great guests.
Top graphic screenshots: Instagram/Kruziuzi
Wait, where was Trump’s national police force? There was a riot and no national guard? Damn, these republicans are just not up to the task. Better get some dems in there to solve the problem.
we used to plan a family trip to pigeon forge every september for the fall rod run. once the rat rods(junkers thrown together not actual thought out projects) and the diesel bro trucks took over, the traffic and headaches for the few actual decent cars just wasnt worth it anymore. fast forward a few years and we stumbled into the jeep invasion on a weekend trip by chance. we did that for several years when we still had our wrangler unlimited. rarely if ever was there this kind of disturbance in any shape form or fashion. even with the traffic being bumper to bumper and taking forever to get anywhere, just a wave of the hand got you in and out of traffic and everyone was chill and having a good time. about the only complaint the city had was unauthorized parking because there just simply were too many jeeps and no real estate to put them. good times.
Stance culture. Predictable. It’s basically mob mentality and desperate attention seeking in vehicular culture form. There is no merit to it beyond a sad need to fit in when nobody else will have you except for other losers who are incapable of doing anything of substance and the only way these Dollar Store people can get any attention at all is through being stupid and obnoxious. Add that to encouragement through social media and the only surprise is that it ever made it through a single event before cancellation.
indeed, the name of the event would have certainly made me not want to attend.
Somebody needs to explain to me what the cool part of just bouncing your engine off the rev limiter is?
Explain it like I really am an old man who yells at clouds?
Like, what is the point beyond just hurting your engine for zero benefit beyond clout?
* Show off your exhaust (which is probably a cheap eBay knockoff that sounds terrible)
* Show off how few ef’s you give (it’s so cool to not care about breaking things)
… that’s all I got. If you are not convinced this is cool, then you are probably over the age of 28.
*age of 8.
The benefit is being “seen” by the “internet” as “cool”.
Worldwide digital communication has really changed the world in way that Al Gore did not intend.
Same as doing a Burnout I suppose. Peacocking at it’s stupidest. Unless you are warming tires on a track, ripping off tires in a parking lot is just damaging your ride in most instances.
The immense satisfaction of hurting other people’s earballs after you’ve destroyed your own.
My 408 race engine is quieter than many stock engines now.
I don’t get it.
It actually has minimal reduction.
I could make it much quieter, and pleasant, and plan to.
Doesn’t seem to slow things down.
WHAT?!?! YOU’VE GOT TO SPEAK UP!
I’ve been stopped more than once by cops checking out the sound level, maybe cause of the large pipe.
No complaints from them.
Well I suppose that’s one way to spend the weekend.
I’ve had worse weekends.
I think most cops like Fords.
Never got a ticket. Two minute stops.
People like these yabos are why we can’t have nice things anymore.
This is why I rarely participate in car events anymore.
Sigh. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Real gearheads hate these idiots. Several cars and coffee events and shows I have been to have really stepped up enforcement against dumb behavior and I’m all for it. I have no problem literally yelling at someone for revving or doing burnouts when it jeopardizes the event for everyone.
Too much of anything tends to be a bad thing.
I’ve never once in my life said, “You know what would make this better? More people!”
There is a critical mass. Like if you go to a party you don’t want it to be just you and the host standing there at the snack table awkwardly. But you don’t want everyone you’ve ever known to crash the party either.
Well that depends on how hot and amorous the host is doesn’t it?
But have there been times where you have thought “you know what would have made this better? Loads of alcohol or drugs”
On the other hand, I have frequently said, “You know what would make this better? Less people!”
Who knew Thanos was my MCU spirit animal. 😉
“Dumbasses ruin everything for others” is not a new thing. But it’s a lot easier with pop tunes and rev limiters, and lots and lots of cellphones.
Doesn’t help that there is nothing for these dipshits to do when whatever show is going on ends at 5-6pm? Vegas can handle this crap, Gatlinburg cannot.
All of these goobers should be forced to drive Yugos and use Nokia bricks for a year or so and that should sort em out.
Motorola Razrs. Those Nokia bricks can kill a man.
Nah, the OG RAZRs were made out of aluminum and almost had a sharp edge when open. Force them into StarTACs. They were small and plastic.
They had a metal shell.
The last phone offering analog service, also.
In federal rain forest, it was the only phone that worked.
I had a line of people with fancy phones using mine till they burned through a stack of batteries.
Wish my current phone worked as well.
Jitterbug! Kiss your social media presence goodbye with a phone that might as well be a walkie-talkie.
Suzuki Esteems!
I worry that the same thing is slowly happening to Monterey Car Week, but luckily there’s enough insanely rich people behind it that I don’t think it will truly get cancelled. I’ve been going since I was a child, and it used to be a lot more chill with the general population tolerating everything a lot more aside from some traffic complaints. Now it’s influencer nation, I think the beginning of the end was the GT3RS donut in downtown Carmel in 2019. Walking around there and car spotting was great but they have it so shut down that it looks like the road going up to the DMZ. They shut down main cruising roads at 10PM in Monterey as well. The general crowd has gotten so bad that to have an enjoyable experience you have to throw major money at tickets to more private events. I used to be a local until 2 years ago, and it’s already hard enough to keep people on board with Laguna Seca – this is truly not helping
The vandalism and sideshows made things pretty bad this year, but it’s not just the hooligans. The thing’s gotten too big. Going anywhere on the peninsula takes forever during car week. It’s gotten to the point where one has to pick one, maaaybe two events to attend on a given day and give up on the rest because you won’t get there in time (let alone find parking). If you’re foolish enough to try showing up toward the end of an event, you’ll get the worst of both worlds as the lots empty and the resulting traffic subsumes you.
Not sure what could make it better. Monterey and Seaside won’t likely do much to mess with that annual influx of sweet car week cash. Carmel might shut things down, which would be sad because it’s prime carspotting grounds outside the paid events. If Exotics on Broadway ran all weekend, that might help attract and contain some of the crowds and antisocial behavior.
I can’t remember a car meet this bad since that time Alexander H. Smyth glove-slapped Sir Anthony Hillman into a duel at the Horseless Carriage club’s Hupmobile pop-up. The constable stopped Hillman before he could even reach the requisite twenty-seven paces required before turning to shoot his blunderbuss. Ruffians.
Quite! This tomfoolery is why I shall only darken the door of the Doble gathering. No roaring of engines or tyre-burnouts there, I assure you! Nay, the only conflagrations are safely contained within the bellies of our Old Friend, the steam car.
Additionally, the tea is always piping hot.
No noise from silent steam until the brisance overtakes the relief valve.
You laugh, but the most annoying person at the Portland All-British Field Meet a few years ago was the guy with the 1929 Bentley who kept starting and revving his engine all day. Didn’t sound good, and smelled terrible.
What does that even smell like? I have to assume it smells like oily leather and beans on toast.
I imagine if you set a rancid dead whale on fire it would smell a bit like that.
Please don’t give RFK Jr a reason to become a fan
Isn’t he into dead bears?
I don’t think he’s terribly LGBT-friendly, no.
When the most heinous behavior is rewarded with the most likes, clicks, page views etc., any incentive to behave is removed and insanity ensues. My last show was H2o 2018. Standing on our balcony watching the cops chase a kid with a gun onto the bay was when I realized it was all going to end badly…..and here we are. Another show gone.
This is why I normally like going to classic car cruise nights because they are normally done before the sun goes down and most the owners are older people who normally don’t act like dumbasses like most these people who I assume are younger or never grew up.
You’ve bestowed upon me a terrible realization: what if the boomers are a critical part of the car show ecosystem?!
Think about it. The boomers, and all the trappings thereof – C5’s only driven the speed limit, incessant wingadinga music, hands-on-beerbelly “I know what I got” haggling, all of it – are as essential to a car show as ladybugs are to controlling aphids. And with them gone, the aphids are wreaking havoc.
It’s either that, or some “correlation doesn’t mean causation” nonsense. Git outta here with your fancy statistics.
Either it is because they are boomers or older gen x or maybe just because they are old? Haha but yeah it really could be a generational thing sure you hear stories from our parents/grand parents of dumb things they did but I think with social media and cell phones everywhere more and more people want to be the next big thing that gets all the clicks. You would hope as they age they grow out of this.
I cannot say I have never done anything stupid (doing donuts in my firebird when I was a early 20 something year old) but as I have gotten older (going onto 33 here soon oh so old hah) stuff like that has really just turned into what am I trying to prove? Even burn outs I do not do anymore as it is just damaging my tires and possibly my trans and rear end.
thing is, you have to admit now: 1) it was stupid 2) it was done to show off for a potential mate
Oh it was stupid and my fiance was in the car with me. She was recording but said recording of the possibly illegal activity has since been lost to time.
They absolutely are.
No Boomer was ever going to this show in the first place, though.
Car shows of all kinds are ultimately about superiority in some form or another. Boomers show superiority by proving the rarity and/or financial value of their mass-produced vehicles to other Boomers in person. Zoomers show superiority by being louder and doing more hijinks than other Zoomers and then posting that to their socials.
Meanwhile, yet again, GenX gets forgotten.
whatever
Combination of participant age and purpose of the event. Boomers were tearing up Woodward Ave with muscle cars back in the day. Now they treat their cars like babies because the shows they’re going to are about preservation, not performance.
Slammedenuff mostly features newer cars with performance modifications owned by younger people. Eventually the people involved will end up like the car show boomers and some of them may even have managed to keep their cars in show condition.
I’m already observing this phenomenon with the tuner guys from the ’90s.
Age comes with experience of knowing when you might make some noise too.
What’s interesting to me is cruising culture is back with the youths in some areas. Some are saying the pandemic helped it come back. A town near me had no cruising signs up for decades after something tragic happened the youth got them to remove the ordinance and signs. There really has been no drama they just drove around and maybe get a coffee or a soda.
Driver training halted many places as these current idiots were reaching driving age.
Pandemic didn’t help.
I meet kids that want to learn how to fix their cars, but feel stymied learning how.
They probably care about driving skills too.
Boomers are also the only ones who can afford the truly exotic shit outside of celebrities, athletes, and the occasional crypto bro. While I’m firmly in the eat the rich category one of the appeals of going to car meets is getting to see McLarens, Lamborghinis, assorted classic muscle cars, etc. in the flesh.
I got to see a goddamn Ford GT the last time I went to Cars and Coffee. How cool is that?
Illegal street racing groups used to be calm and polite, other than the obvious, racing in surreptitious locations.
I blame those fast and furry movies
I blame those fast and furry movies
I believe you frequent a different corner of the internet than I
This is a great place to have car shows, low key/affordable/family friendly/scenic drives, but past couple of years, the IDGAF people have been ramping it up and are generating a lot of blow back from the Locals and Law Enforcement that something needs to be done to shut this type behavior down.
Most who live in East TN purposely avoid the Sevierville/Pigeon Forge area when a car show in town (there are several). Definitely don’t want to go anywhere near the Dragon on the weekends if you’re out for an easy cruise!
I don’t live there, but I try to avoid those two areas at all times. Blech.
Agree, Pigeon Forge area is my personal definition of Hell.
Do they actually forge pigeons out of metal?
People acting like uneducated idiots?
In the south?
No way!
Wouldn’t say this is just a South thing you can see dumb street take overs and people driving like idiots and destroying car shows no matter what state you are in.
Just to be “that guy”, I’ve never heard of one in Alaska or Wyoming.
Haha you just offended the whole 2 people living in Wyoming. I’ll have to ask my boss (who is from Alaska) if there are any street take overs there if so it is probably from dog sled teams being chased by moose and bears.
I don’t know why they would be insulted; I said they don’t have things that we all agree make places worse. You’re probably right about it the bears taking over in Alaska.
Damn, now I really want to see a dog sled doing a donut in a frozen Nome intersection while a grizzly loses traction and takes out a crowd of moose spectators.
With AI nowadays you could probably ask it to make that video for you haha
I tried three different AI image generators and they all suck. Human creators are safe for the moment.
Very cliche, but the first person I met in Wyoming was on horseback, actually a world class cutter!
There’s like 12 people combined in both those states, though.
Well, Firebirdman says there are 2 people in Wyoming, so I guess the other 10 are in Alaska?
Car shows in Alaska involve shooting vehicles off a cliff.
A lot of these folks are from north of the Mason-Dixon line also…it’s not their town, so they don’t GAF. Like Florida and their spring breaker problems.
I grew up in the South. I saw the location for this event and immediately thought “yes, this tracks.”
Seen Detroit lately?
Racism toward the south.
Very original
The F you talking about?
I’m locationist, if anything.
Since race isn’t a real thing scientifically, and even if it were, the term is used in a completely arbitrary way these days, so there isn’t a meaningful difference.
But I like the locationist term.
Stereotyping the south has remained socially acceptable in a way few other things are, especially in hollywood.
Sociologists studying different areas of the country found most differences to be inaccurate, like rate of speech.
However, they found a much higher expectation of basic courtesy in the south, often still written into laws.
A friend from New England even commented about how polite strangers are here, compared to home.
I’ve been all over, but an area long reputed to be backwards that I always assumed was not, is southern Illinois and Indiana.
In my limited time there, the level of dumbidity was astounding.
there are bad actors in just about any car community once it reaches a certain size, but the most extreme poser groups are normally the worst. poser groups are people who mod their cars to generally pose as a real performance vehicle, but in such a way that they actively ruin most performance. Stance life and brodozers are the biggest that come to mind. Stance lifers are posing the look of actual track cars (mostly drift cars but even more general track cars), but do the mods in a such a way that make the cars slower in every respect. I like a low car, I like a low car with some negative camber, but I do not understand stance life cars. Brodozers lift their trucks to look like actual offroad racing/rock crawlers, but they put useless wheel/tire combinations that make it very difficult to do any type of offroading or towing, making the truck worse than a stock truck and not have the performance chops to back it up. Again, I like a lifted truck with good off road tires for rock crawling or racing, but I just cant be on board with these. I hate to car kink shame, but so many of these people need ot just keep their cars stock and find other hobbies if they think stance life/brodozering is what they should be doing.
Nah man, stance stuff is pretty chill as you can’t go very fast without damaging things. Metrics don’t make a car better, and I drove my dropped/stretched tire VW golf like 30k miles without issues, other than ruining a few chin spoilers. It responded amazing due to a slight stretch and not much sidewall, was very fun to drive. It was not a track car, it was a street car.
I can respect that, I was probably being a bit aggressive and over generalizing instead of focusing on the small subset of people that take it to the extremes. I had a jetta that was slammed on coilovers when I bought it. I raised it a tiny bit but it was still quite low and I really enjoyed that car. I definitely enjoy a nice lowered car!
Anything taken to the ‘extreme’ tends to make an absolutely horrible vehicle. See: mudding, rock crawling, drag racing, top speed chasers, track cars, etc.
Yes those things are bad at many aspects of being a vehicle, but they tend to be very good at at least one aspect of being a vehicle, i.e. getting from point A to B very quickly, Or getting there when other vehicles cannot (like rock crawling). My concern with the ultra slammed cars is they cant really claim to be better at even a single thing, but again, I know I am over generalizing and my personal car biases are coming out.
They generally look better, if they aren’t all cambered out.
https://imgur.com/gallery/stance-101-understanding-what-stance-actually-means-m5JkB
Upsizing wheels, and reducing wheel gap tends to get production cars CLOSER to the original design intent.
The extreme “stance life” cars you’re probably thinking of don’t really exist as a massive movement, though. It’s mostly just a handful of weirdo meme cars people cobble together in a weekend to get on the Instagram Discovery page. Wheel fitment is just something that’s been almost universally integrated into car culture now – there’s no real “stance” movement.
I definitely see far less of the very stanced cars out there compared to the brodozers, but its not quite low enough for me to put them in the likes of “art cars” in terms of volume. But yea I was over generalizing.
Today is the first I’ve even heard the term brodozer.
It’s not really self explanatory.
Is that just an Autopian thing?
I heard of this term over a decade ago, but yea I suppose its not very common. I see them as the trucks that are lifted very high but then put giant wheels with very low pro tires. Usually the wheels also stick out beyond the side of the trucks quite a bit, and often they have giant smoke stack exhausts or other large exhausts to roll coal. These are broad generalizations though.
I don’t get the low profile tire thing at all.
Neighbor had those on his truck, but not long.
I don’t think stacks affect exhaust.
Black exhaust is just bad tuning.
Mine is 4 or 5 inches as they’re sensitive to back pressure, but exhaust is clear.
No one I know approves of doing stupid things to your truck.
I’d say that nearly all mods make cars worse. There was an army of engineers that made a cohesive design to haul people around. You might be able to make a car a decent track car, but in so doing, you’ll ruin it for the street. You might be able to put a lift on your Jeep and get over rougher terrain, but it’ll be worse on the highway. All this to say that people don’t do mods to make their cars better, they do them to make them what they want them to be and you or I don’t need to appreciate it to make it successful. People who act badly should be treated with derision and universally scorned whether they are doing it with their cars or not.
What this take leaves out is the bean counters. If we’re talking about a brand new GT3RS then, no, nothing you can do is really going to fundamentally improve that car in a major way.
If we’re talking about a Honda Fit, say, then yes, you can actually improve it both as a road car and a performance car with the right mods. Cars are engineered around cost, and naturally, there’s going to be features left out on cheap cars that you can put back with modifications. Tires, suspension, light power mods, etc. can really perk up a lot of cars. The huge basic items you can’t really change like body rigidity, dimensions, etc. are already set in stone, but there’s oftentimes a myriad of ways in which more pedestrian cars can be improved. The trick is knowing what you’re doing and spending money on good parts.
Why does everyone blame the bean counters? All we accountants do is give information to management to make decisions. Management insists on a particular profit margin and we tell them what it will take to achieve it. Anyway, that wasn’t really your point.
You’re right about cars being built to a cost and I did not consider that. But I also said “nearly all” so I could worm my way out of it when someone made a valid point, so there.
Found the CPA in our midst
I nearly agree with you 100% 🙂
As “The NSX Was Only in Development for 4 Years” mentioned, I think its all about the car being modded and what mods are being done. I respect that a lot of mods people do are just to personalize their cars, while other mods are to try and improve some kind of performance (which normally lowers performance elsewhere). I get a bit caught up in the cars that do mods that seem to be copying performance mods but only to personalize, while still lowering performance elsewhere (i.e. brodozers).
Every car was built to a budget and specific set of performance metrics, but I have yet to find a car that falls perfectly into what my personal budget/performance targets are. So I mod to get that closer to alignment. It might be to improve the audio system, but normally for me, its to make the car generally faster with turbo upgrades, better brakes, etc. This normally impacts ride quality and fuel consumption though.
If I was ever wealthy enough to have a 911GT3 RS I would still probably find brake upgrades or minor aero/cooling upgrades or power upgrades for the type of abuse I would put it through (being in the corvette world I see others hunting for faster lap times and upgrading even top spec 911s, corvette ZR1s etc.)
As a tunable car, like any proper race car, it might have a dozen ways it could be set up for the same track, even affected by weather.
Then, there is the next track.
When you start to understand what’s involved, it’s ovèrwhelming at first, but you learn.
I spend more time selecting parts than I do adding them.
As someone who organizes car enthusiast events, none of this came as a shock to me. I’ve had confrontations with people pop-revving, doing burnouts, etc. SlammedEnuff is aimed at stance kids who are typically poorly-bahaved. You’d never see this kind of behavior at an actual lowrider show.
These days any nighttime car events that are open to anyone seem to quickly get ruined by either 1) Proud young owners of stanced Carmax inventory getting stoned and starting fights 2) Modern muscle owners “swinging” into light poles or 3) Freshly-licensed high school kids bouncing off the limiter trying to lay rubber in mom’s Sonata.
I’ve mostly stopped attending generalized “popup” meets, especially those at night, and I no longer host nighttime events other than an invitation-only trunk or treat at Halloween.
I was on the same highways at the same time as people going to and from Slammedenough this past weekend, and “Stanced Carmax inventory” is EXACTLY correct. It was entirely Civics, Accords, Camrys, Infiniti G37s and Q50s, Lexus IS, and Nissans, nothing cool or interesting in its own right, ruined by man children with room temperature IQs and lawyer dads.
There were a few nice easter eggs among the chaff…typically the ones setup as Rally style cars, definitely some serious mods going on.
Car culture writ large basically mirrors American culture writ large at the moment. It’s a festering swamp of idiots with main character syndrome all conditioned to think and act the same way because of social media algorithms. It’s pointless to try and save it at this point. The only thing you can do is preserve your own sanity by withdrawing as much as possible. Find your niche, find a handful of people like you who also like the same niche, and just exist. The broader culture is dead.
You basically echoed the same point I was trying to make, only more eloquently. Hard agree on all counts.
Wow, you just identified why I no longer read Politico or The Hill.
And to some point, look at our role models of proper behavior: our political leadership (both sides). Decorum and Professionalism are out the window.
I’m not sure why you think this is a both sides issue. The biggest complaint most Lefts have is that the Democrats are too mild. I don’t recall any Democrats showing their colleagues naked pictures of their underaged girlfriends or starting physical altercations in Congress. The most outlandish thing they’ve done is show up to that one speech with placards saying stuff like “Save Medicaid” and “No kings”. Truly vile behavior, to be sure*, but it pales in comparison to Republican antics.
*: That was sarcasm, since I know it’s hard to tell these days.
Way ahead of you.
When I was a kid, there were niche newstand car magazines with how to articles that were very ambitious, like cut the body here, weld here and so on.
Something to aspire to.
My rule for car meets is, “What percentage of attendees have an umbrella policy?”
It’s more a hypothetical question. If the overwhelming response from an attendee would be, “LOL, bro what’s an umbrella policy?!” then it’s not an event to attend.
I kind of learned this the better part of 15+ years ago with rallies. There are one or two that were doing a series of actual track events, but rather than directly participate “in the rally” I looked at their itinerary, signed up for the same track events that interested me and tailed them by an hour or so.
I got to do all the fun things, but avoided getting nailed in a highway patrol sting. Which on the last one I attended, they did. Three times.
As for the track events, oof. Yeah, I don’t go out with the first group. I’m more than happy to sit around, talk to people, eat food and go out in the later ones. Groups towards the end of the day (but not the last one) tend to have the fewest offs and traffic.
I’m going to go ahead and call this this for what it is — Yet another inevitable manifestation of an endemic and distinctly American culture that a friend so eloquently refers to as “hooray for me and fuck you.” This sort of behavior has become our national brand, and it extends far beyond whatever passes for car culture at this point. The only reason cars are involved is because the noise and the smoke and speed further the ability of dipshits to make spectacles of themselves.
Maybe it’s the now decades-long appetite for outraging public decency for the sake of clout that took seed in early reality television, metastasized with the advent of social media, and has now manifested in a real-life idiocracy replete with with MMA fights on the White House lawn. Whatever it is, it’s only getting worse. Sure, there are pockets of decency to be found here and there, but they’re in danger of disappearing altogether, especially in the automotive world.
It’s trickle-down shittiness.
Absolutely.
American Exceptionalism is largely entitlement.
We’ve had a west-end meetup in Ottawa that’s been off again, on again for about 20 years now known as “M&Ms”, cause of the street names it lines up with.
It’s an endless cycle of growing, people doing dumb stuff and losing the space, then the meet dies for 6 months to a couple years.
We’ve opted to set up smaller meets where we control who attends. We have a zero tolerance approach to recklessness/nuisance. The result is we’ve never had an incident in 10 years.
Stance cars are dumb, and their drivers often act dumb, so this doesn’t surprise me at all.
And when I say dumb, I mean objectively, stanced cars with 10+ degrees of camber driving around on public roads is objectively dangerous. Stupid is as stupid does.
This is nothing to do with “stance”, which is such a broad term it can mean anything you want it to. This is just Zoomers continuing to prove that they have no real interest in this hobby outside of using it as a staging area for whatever stupid kind of brand they’re trying to personally curate on social media.
It’s morons in Chargers, Challengers, clapped-out modern BMWs, leased supercars, and liter bikes who ruin events like this. The people who have no interest in building anything outside of just putting on straight pipes and an obnoxious vinyl wrap.
Yup, every car has a stance.
I wrote this a few years ago to help educate:
https://imgur.com/gallery/stance-101-understanding-what-stance-actually-means-m5JkB
Maybe
I had an ex race car that I never measured, but was estimated at 15 degrees, more than intended.
I never changed it, as the rain performance was stunning!
No different than the H20 in Ocean City. I love that area, but that’s because I like going to Dollywood