Not Always Fast and Strangely Curious

The car enthusiast culture in Singapore is a funny beast. This country’s significant lack of land space also means that open blacktop is quite literally non existent. Fast & Furious wannabes have to either be content with cruising around town trying to look important, or head up across the causeway where the roads are longer. But the traffic along the North-South Hghway is often so crammed with heavy vehicles and express buses that having an open stretch to cruise down is quite impossible.

The romanticized scenes of the open highway that are so prominent in American road movies, where you can drive along for hours without ever easing up on the throttle can never be realised here, and I wonder if local drivers who have never had the experience to do it know how liberating the feeling is. Our local street car culture seems to be a mishmash of everything loud without creative expression. While our Australian counterparts have long taken to using painted, airbrushed paintings and graphics onto their show vehicles, much of our Singaporean vehicles rely on simple vinyl stickers. While freedom of expression in other countries with a strong street car culture result in bonnets and doors being painted with custom images, the best our locals can seem to do is stick Japanese ‘Fujiwara Tofu Shop’ decals along the sides. Never mind if it’s not even a Trueno.

Sometimes I wonder if some of these sticker happy yet clueless drivers even look on the internet, where sites like www.riceboypage.com show how tasteless these ‘mods’ are. They paste stickers, mount spoilers and gigantic bodykits in an effort to make their tiny vehicles look more muscular and mean, but a Kia is just a Kia. No amount of ‘Mugen Power’, ‘TRD’ or ‘Ralliart’ stickers is going to make it look fiercer or more intimidating, especially with the little asthmatic engine wheezing under the hood. Sticking the wrong sticker onto your car, like a TRD sticker onto a Mazda, is also a surefire sign that the driver doesn’t have a clue to what he is doing.

Then there are the A.S.K.s, or Ah-Siah Kiahs, with plenty of daddy’s money to burn and a desperate need to show off their alpha maleness. Hook them up with a brand new Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, point them towards a car modification workshop, and watch the shop owner rub his hands with glee. The said A.S.K. will proceed to buy every possible hop-up part to make his Lancer Evo faster and louder than everybody else’s. After all that is done, he will spend all his free time cruising and doing laps of orchard road during the weekends. The fanboys call it ‘rounding’. I have a better term. It’s: “Hey look at me I have a big and loud macho car. It’s much cooler than your lousy Corolla. Watch me show you all my macho-ness as I weave dangerously through traffic and engage in impromptu drag races with others on public roads. No it’s not dangerous. It shows all you common people how exciting I am and I also hope to impress my girlfriend who is sitting in the car with me right now.”

Just what is the point? They call it ‘an expression of individuality’, but the way they do it is more akin to blaring, jumping and dancing. Hopping up a car to race down the streets is not simply dangerous to these drivers, but it endangers the lives of the other road users around them, people with families, wives, husbands and children. The thing with A.S.K.s is that many tend to be young, at an age where they think that they are is absolute control and are immortal. They cannot grasp the fact that there are always factors beyond their control, and take unnecessary risks to add the thrill factor to their lives. Funny thing is, many are also physically unfit and pasty white from sitting inside an air-conditioned car at every chance they get. How about getting out sometime?

To consider itself a subculture worth looking at, our street car culture needs a serious injection of creativity beyond the few show cars that are imported just for the shows, with more groundbreaking work being done instead of just copying the trends set by the Japanese and Americans. Not all are bad though, for there are a select group of driving enthusiasts who do their serious driving on the racetracks in Malaysia, all while driving civilly on public roads. It doesn’t make them any less macho that the A.S.K. blazing down Orchard Road in his hopped-up WRX, scaring old ladies with his mind numbing exhaust note that has been further modified to be ten times louder than anybody else’s.

Credits: Lionel Kong