Wall Street Journal Features dB Drag Racing
For Immediate Release
1/27/2003
January 27, 2003
©Wall Street Journal - Portals
by Lee Gomes
Reprinted with permission
New Extreme Sport: Blasting Car Radios
If you could somehow make your car stereo system as loud as a locomotive engine, you would still have a long way to go before you would impress Wayne Harris.
Mr. Harris is the owner and impresario behind dB Drag Racing, a rapidly growing group of enthusiasts who take the love of gadgets to startling heights. The group lives in an alternative technology universe far removed from the polite world of middle-class laptops and PDAs.
DB stands for decibels. In dB Drag Racing, the winning car is not the fastest, but the one with the loudest stereo system. Mr. Harris lords over this world, incongruously, from here in Coeur dAlene, Idaho, an upscale lakeside development for people who want to escape city life and all its noise.
Actually, dB draggers say they frown on driving around disturbing the peace. Indeed, dB Drag Racing contests have little resemblance to the bass-thumping duels on urban street corners on a Saturday night. In dB Drag Racings top category of competition — called, logically, Extreme — vehicles are completely rebuilt to turn them into decibel factories.
They may contain dozens of subwoofers, each with their own amplifier, requiring enough total power to run four or five houses. Power cables are as thick as garden hoses. One contestant built his own subwoofer — six feet in diameter. It blew out the lights on top of his truck.
Thats just the start. The cars doors are often filled with concrete — and concrete is sometimes even poured on the floor — to help keep the precious sound pressure inside, where the volume is measured. Normal car windows are replaced by glass several inches thick, for the same reason.
All that reinforcing means that if you are standing outside a car with its windows rolled up, as they are in competition, it will sound rather quiet, relatively speaking.
By the time a car — or more typically, a van — is ready for Extreme dB Drag Racing competition, it can weigh six tons. Most arent actually driven on the street. The owners, usually a team of dB Drag buffs, truck the car around to competitions.
At decibel-measuring time, the team of owners will stand around their car, leaning in hard against its doors and windows. Some of them will even lie spread-eagled on the roof. All this keeps the frame from vibrating, and adds several fractions of a decibel to the score.
It is quite a spectacle, says Mr. Harris.
DB Drag Racing has its finals once a year in Nashville, Tenn. This isnt just another case of Americans car fetish; a quarter of the groups 20,000 members are from overseas.
In fact, last years competition was won in an upset by a team from Germany, who rang up 177.7 decibels, beating the favored team from Ozark, Mo., by 1.8 decibels. Because raising sound by just three decibels requires a doubling of power, the victory margin was something of a Nixonian landslide.
How did the Germans do it? No one really knows. They put up curtains inside their vans windows to hide their trade secrets. The judges, though, were at least able to check that they didnt cheat, like the contestant who once exploded his air bag in a competition, illegally gaining several extra decibels.
A decibel level of 177.7 ostensibly is as loud as a 747 at 50 feet, though Mr. Harris says such comparisons are misleading, because a jet puts out its sonic energy all across the spectrum, not just in one small part if it, as happens with the bass frequencies used exclusively in dB Drag.
Still, it is very, very loud. If you opened up the vans doors and turned up the volume, it would sound like artillery fire.
Mr. Harris, who is 41 years old, has been involved in loud cars since he was an engineering student in Texas. He worked for two decades at Rockford Fosgate, the big Tempe, Ariz., car-audio company, designing products, writing articles and making speeches, eventually becoming a superstar in the world of the cars that go boom.
He now does dB Drag Racing full time. There will be hundreds of dB Drag competitions this year, leading up to the finals; most are sponsored by car-stereo dealers.
Mr. Harris has long had licensing deals from all the big car-audio manufacturers. But he worries that after six years, the sport has reached its limit as a grass-roots phenomenon.
He wants some sponsor, he says, to take it to the next level. Some corporate type like Mountain Dew, perhaps, or even Microsoft selling X-box videogames. There would be a big dB Drag Racing semi, and it would go on a national tour. We have the demographics, he says.
Its probably inevitable. All things extreme have become a staple, even a cliche, for advertisers. The phenomenon of The Fast and Furious, the street-racing movie, didnt hurt, either.
But would such a tour visit Mr. Harriss town? The streets here in Coeur dAlene are so quiet, you can hear anything, even the soft clicking of someone dialing police to complain about the loud car stereo that just drove by.
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