Stephen Marche is a writer based in Toronto.
The black Mercedes-Benz with dealer plates cuts us off at the lights on the corner of Highways 7 and 27, in the middle of the Greater Toronto Area, nearly clipping our front fender. It’s deliberate. He sees we’re a cop car. He wants a chase.
Sergeant Mark Walton gives him one. The second the siren wails, the Benz is gone, 180 according to the dashboard radar, 180 in a 70 zone, well past the threshold for stunt driving in Ontario. Weaving through traffic, it careens south down the cloverleaf onto the 407, going well over 200 kilometres an hour. We are in pursuit until the Benz rises to 220, 240 and Sgt. Walton eases up. The situation is too dangerous to continue.
The police in the Greater Toronto Area decide who to chase and who not to chase on the premise of public safety. But it’s a matter of fine judgment. Who knows who was in that black Benz? It was most likely some junior mechanic out for a joy ride with a customer’s pride and joy in the shop for repairs. Dealer plates are pretty easy to borrow for an evening. So whoever was in that Benz was probably more or less harmless other than the fact he was running from the police.
On the other hand, the night before, the driver of a car that was doing 200 on the 407 had held up a string of convenience stores, so the cops had to pursue. And then, on the other hand, in April, Durham Regional Police chased an armed robbery suspect – a guy with a knife at an LCBO – the wrong way down the 401 east of Toronto; the crash killed two grandparents and their three-month-old grandson. On these roads, sometimes there are only poor choices.
A chase like this is more or less an every night thing for York Regional Police’s High-Risk Traffic Unit. Sgt. Walton shrugs. “It’s happening more and more often,” he tells me.
The reason the black Benz cut us off, the reason he decided to race a cop on the streets of Vaughan, is the oldest reason there is: A young man wanted to show off. He wanted a cop chase for the story, something to tell his buddies. He was chasing clout. In Toronto, the drivers are chasing clout, and the cops are chasing the clout chasers.
If you drive in or around the Greater Toronto Area, you already know you live in an area filled with vehicular psychos. There’s stats if you need them. In 2021, then-mayor John Tory called stunt driving “an epidemic,” after Ontario driving fatalities reached a 10-year high. And 2023 was worse than 2022.
But do you really need numbers if you live here? Anyone who’s ever taken Highway 400 coming home from a cottage knows. You can feel the unsafety: 98 per cent of Ontario drivers say they’ve seen dangerous driving, which leads me to ask where the other 2 per cent have been driving. And it’s not like you can avoid it. The average Torontonian spent 98 hours last year in traffic. We are the third-worst city in the world for congestion, the worst in North America.
The constipation of Toronto’s condofying downtown gives way to a ring of bright barbarism on the margins, the 427 to the 401 to the 404. And on these roads, glorious resplendent tribes of drivers have created their own ritual orders. The MeetUp scene, the TOTakeover scene, the street racing scene. These tribes live by beauty and daring.
Somewhere in Brampton, way west of Vaughan, in front of a TD Bank across from a Winners beside a Starbucks, a royal blue Mustang and a white BMW 335i are trading backfires, in a lot full of candy-coloured coupes, supercharged compacts, a blazing ridiculous SUV with whirling green and purple underglow and the hatchback folding up to reveal a raised wall of speakers. The air is thick with burning rubber and skunky pot, and the enthusiasts wandering through the haze turn to the sound of the backfires like fish in a tank, a school of uplifted phones drifting toward stimulus. They have only a few minutes to record the blue flames spurting out of the exhaust. A police siren starts to wail, a cop car flashes up. Instinctively, automatically, a dozen or so spectators pull bandanas over their faces and calmly walk toward the intruder, bringing authority to a halt. The Mustang slips effortlessly in the other direction.
Almost every weekend night a scene like this plays out in one or another of the corners of the GTA, behind the Cineplex Colossus in Vaughan or at a Canadian Tire lot on the Queensway or in front of a Home Depot near the 427. Meetups, where enthusiasts gather to brag and bicker about the comparative power and beauty of their vehicles, are practically as old as cars themselves. But recently a new, toxic car culture has emerged in the GTA: TOTakeovers. TOTakeover drivers do incredibly dangerous, stupid, reckless acts to post themselves doing incredibly dangerous, stupid reckless acts on social media. They’re in it for the likes, Cardashians.
The early COVID-19 lockdowns left the Toronto area's streets all but deserted, a fertile ground for street racing and illicit activity.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The worst of it started during the pandemic. In 2020, between mid-March and the end of June, the police handed out 443 tickets for racing and stunt-driving in Toronto alone – a 357-per-cent increase over the previous year.
COVID-19 didn’t create these problems, but it vastly expanded their reach and prominence. Without bars, clubs and other people’s houses, empty parking lots turned into primary venues of the city’s frozen delirium. Doing doughnuts in a parking lot outside a shuttered strip mall is a perfect metaphor for the COVID experience: drifting, pointless, circular, empty, maddening. We were all spinning our wheels during the pandemic. The clout chasers were literally spinning their wheels. The empty roads made for drastic temptations. It was perfectly common for officers to clock drivers doing three times the speed limit. Why not? There was nobody else on the road.
At the edge of the Brampton parking lot, after the Mustang has sped off, five police cruisers line up with their lights flashing. For the moment, they are watching the crowd milling around the cars, waiting to see which way the evening is going to go: high-school social or road warrior. Every Friday and Saturday night, in the places built for cars not people, the police and the drivers dance around each other this way. Sometimes everybody goes home quietly. Sometimes the cops arrest people. Sometimes people have ice cream. Sometimes people die.
Mark Walton, the sergeant as sturdy and no-nonsense as the F-150 he drives, heads up the high-risk traffic unit in York Region. Over the past few years, several police initiatives have taken on the huge spike in stunt driving. In the face of public outcry and the persistence of the problem, York Region formed a permanent force, eight officers and a helicopter, in January, 2021. Project Takeover, a joint operation of York Regional Police, Peel Police, Toronto Police and the OPP, led to 70 arrests, 346 charges and 61 impounded vehicles in 2021.
I cannot begin to tell you how poor a life decision it is to race against the police. It rates somewhere between knocking up your high-school girlfriend and falling asleep while smoking a joint. You really, really, really do not want to race against the police. Really. They don’t need to catch you to catch you. The helicopter picks you up. You drive home. A few hours later, when they’re done doing more important work, they drive over and arrest you. Sometimes they wait till the morning so they’re fresh when they take away your car.
Whoever was in that black Benz got lucky. The helicopter happened to be refuelling. There was no air support. In July, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the province was buying, rather than leasing, five new helicopters at a price of $134-million. Durham, Halton, Peel, Toronto and Ottawa will each have its own. Which makes street racing just that much worse an idea than it was before.
And once the police catch you, they’re not nice about it. When the High-Risk Traffic Unit isn’t out at night, they stake out dangerous drivers’ houses and if they catch people they’ve charged violating their court-mandated orders in any way, they impound that car and they arrest them all over again. They have pictures in their offices of the fanciest cars they’ve impounded just that way, trophies of their own. Frankly, they’re vindictive. They don’t like having to chase idiots around the city.
Sometimes they even troll the clout chasers online, such as the time York Region police posted a TikTok of themselves impounding the blue BMW of a street racing influencer who had posted that the “OPP/YRP/Peel ain’t catching this” and “no plate no case.” They took their time over that reel, too, posing with his vanity plates “Smurfy” and “Will Run,” and putting a cop emoji beside a “caught ya” tag. It has accumulated 336,000 likes at the time of writing.
Last month they posted the helicopter coverage of a Lamborghini – flying down the highway at more than 200 km/h – that ran from the police then lost a tire on the 407. It’s sort of funny, sort of scary, mostly pathetic.
The police have other kinds of clout than just social media, of course. The stakes for stunt driving are high: an immediate 30 day roadside licence suspension. Then, if you’re convicted, they suspend your licence for one to three years for the first offence, three to 10 years for the second, lifetime for the third. Stunt driving is often a prelude to bus-taking and long-distance walking.
Even with those stakes, there are compulsive dangerous drivers who won’t stop unless they’re in jail. Some give fake addresses and drive anyway, over and over and over again. Their car is the source of the meaning in their lives. The police keep arresting them until they find a new religion.
Sgt. Walton cruises the parking lots and highways of Vaughan like a trained hunter reading signs. The meetup for the night, the one the High-Risk Unit found promoted on Instagram, is in the parking lot of the Windflower Gate Mall, a popular spot in Vaughan because of the rather decent ice cream at La Paloma. Three white Mustangs manspread across the lines. Tasteful, low, metallic grey Corvettes muscle up beside each other companionably. There are also a dozen or so Subarus and Hondas, elaborately rimmed, supercharged and stripped of their catalytic converters to make them loud. A lime green Camaro poses questions of its owner: What happened in his childhood that made him need this car? Sgt. Walton is unimpressed. “This parking lot was full during COVID,” he tells me.
The meetup scene in Toronto is as diverse and beautiful as the cars themselves. I doubt there is a more diverse group on the planet than a Toronto meetup – maybe a cocktail party at the United Nations. There are classic car nuts, reliving their youths in old Chevvies; world rally championship fans; Japanese Domestic Market connoisseurs.
Most of them, the vast majority, are not idiots like the driver of the black Benz. Most of them are pretty decent guys. Like any male-dominated activity, 95 per cent of the guys are great, 4 per cent are jackasses and 1 per cent are psychos.
“A lot of it boils down to the good, the bad and the ugly,” Ethan Figliomeni, a typical early 20-ish car enthusiast who’s working on a documentary about the scene says. “The good is a couple of guys, just shooting the shit, talking about cars. We all have this passion for the automotive world and we want to share our knowledge and experience, and we all want to meet like-minded people.”
For the proud owners of Toyota Supras, Lamborghinis, Ferraris and other prized sports cars, meetups offer a chance to share that pride with others.TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images; Robert Hradil/Getty Images; Thomas White/Reuters
At its core, car culture is a masculine form of crafting. It’s like people who make their own honey or go to Comic Con dressed up like stormtroopers. It’s a status system hived off from the mainstream. You may not be important at your job or in your family, but if you know cars and can build one that’s beautiful, you will matter here. The meetups often have a distinct “living at home with your parents while you go to community college” vibe. An evening listening to guys talk about cars at a meetup is closer to Superbad than it is to The Fast and the Furious.
The cars themselves can be devastatingly slick and cool – Toyota Supras, Mitsubishi Lancers, the Nissan Skyline GT-R, a Mercedes AGM like a crouched predator – or they can be ridiculous, a matte pink Miata like a toy blown up to real-life size. Some big Jeeps look more or less like mobile nightclubs, with interiors like bottle service booths, lighting and speaker systems at full blaze. Some cars are just expensive, your Ferraris and Lamborghinis and the rest, but they’re less impressive, at least to me, than the modified Hondas and Mitsubishis. These cheap little modified cars may not be as formally impressive as the luxury products, but you can feel the love coming off them. Like devoted home chefs, their owners have figured out how to take basic ingredients, on a budget, and find individual expression. They are truly things of beauty.
The noise of the cars is part of their beauty, too, and here taste is equally personal. The V8 guys want it crackling, aggressive. Others like their engines purring, refined and deadly. Engine sounds, too, are crafted effects. They’re the result of how you strip out the catalytic converter, install a straight pipe and drill holes in the exhaust.
But the cars themselves – their power, their design, their sound – is only half of the meetup experience. The social media about the cars is at least as much the point of the scene as the cars themselves. A typical post from a meetup organizer will mention six official photographers, an official videographer and an official drone videographer. But there are plenty of unofficial photographers and videographers at these events, too. And everybody else is on their phones. Instagram is where the action is. Officialphatfarmcarmeets has 42,000 followers. 905streetkings has more than 92,000. There’s a whole genre of addictive TikTok videos featuring videos of drifting cars intercut with girls dancing over phonk music. They’re the kind of thing you look at for a moment just to see how stupid they are and when you look up you’ve spent 45 minutes watching them.
Not everyone who modifies his car knows what he’s doing, of course. Sgt. Walton cruises the parking lots spotting the way certain tires fit on axles, the position of the exhaust on the car’s rear, the type of glass used to cover the licence plates. These details show who’s an idiot and who’s not, and what species of idiot the idiots happen to be. On the night of our chase, one mechanical genius has modified the engine of his Acura and cannot figure out how to turn it off. One of the officers in the unit is an ex-mechanic and tries to help the would-be roadster figure it out. But they can’t let him back on the road. The man can’t turn his car off and on.
The meetup scene is almost all ordinary guys with an ordinary appreciation for beautiful cars and an even more ordinary urge to show off. Almost but not all. At Windflower Gate, back in Vaughan, dirt bikes zip through the plaza. They have no licence plates or they’ve folded their licence plates. As the evening develops, several of the cars posing in the lot will drift into the dark corners on the edges of the city to race. The dirt bikes are spotters.
In the good, the bad and the ugly of the Toronto car scene, the racers are the bad. Sometimes the racers kill strangers.
“It’s ego,” Mr. Figliomeni tells me. “It’s just dudes being dudes. So, it will be ‘my car’s faster than your car,’ and the other guy’s like ‘prove it.’ ”
If you go to a certain kind of bar, at a certain hour of night, certain kinds of mid-20s men will end up fighting in the street. It’s the same type of guys at meetups, probably some of the same actual guys. The old, old story: when trash-talking goes wrong. So what might happen is a V-8 Corvette pulls up beside a guy with a supercharged Honda S-2000, and they open their hoods. One guy says his V-8 can outmuscle any Honda. The other guy says Corvettes are too damn heavy. One guy’s on semi-slicks and the other guy isn’t, and they argue about how much tires matter for a bit. The guy in the Corvette goes for a gelato and the guy with the S-2000 goes for an espresso, and then they come back and they talk about races they’ve seen between Mitsubishi Lancers and Mustangs, and their friends join in and give their unhelpful opinions, and the drivers eventually go try and prove themselves either on the highway or an industrial park.
The apex street racers are more organized and more private. They’re the opposite of clout chasers. They don’t brag. They don’t post. They meet in the middle of the night, say 2 a.m., at a prearranged stretch of premium highway, somewhere like Trafalgar Road and the 407. They drive up their elite machines – McClarens, Nissan GTRs – in trailers. They efficiently, briefly, close off a section of road. Then they race. Tens of thousands of dollars may be at stake. But the real prize is the title. 407 King. There’s some guy driving in this city with that as his licence plate.
These guys don’t put their races on social media. They sure as hell don’t talk to journalists. But the other drivers know about them, and the police do, too. These drivers are low priority, though. Police respond to complaints and threats to public safety. These particular racers don’t generate either.
A tip for prospective criminals: The police care about crime when it’s noisy. When crime gets noisy, people complain. Police have to respond to complaints. It’s a good rule of life generally: the quieter you are, the more you can get away with. But the point of TOTakeover scene is to be loud. In an Instagram reel one of the meetup organizers would post later from the scene in Brampton, a phone recorded a noise level of 129.4 decibels, nearing jet engine levels, well past the point of physical pain.
If the meetups are the good and the racers are the bad, the takeover clubs are the ugly.
“These are the guys who will go to a perfectly sanctioned, perfectly fine car meet and start doing burnouts, start doing doughnuts,” Mr. Figliomeni says. “Many people, like myself, don’t have a lot of respect for them. Because you’re taking something that’s good, something that’s organized, and you’ve broken that line of trust.” The takeover clubs force the police to involve themselves, annoying everybody else. “I can’t give the police any shit for it, either,” Mr. Figliomeni says, “because there’s no way to distinguish who is going to cause trouble and who just has a nice loud car and wants to enjoy themselves.”
The takeover scene lives by social media. They do incredibly dangerous stupid things because incredibly dangerous stupid things get the most attention online. Which is why the cops are going to win their battle against them. This isn’t the drug war. These guys make it easy. They post their antics on Instagram feeds or on YouTube, thinking they’re disguising their locations because they identify themselves as 905Mexicoruns. (They wave Mexican flags in some videos.) Again, COVID started it. The stunt drivers who used to go to the H20i in Ocean City in Maryland, the biggest car event in North America, couldn’t cross the border, so they went to Wasaga Beach instead. The takeovers there became a regular nightmare for that community.
In 2021, during one weekend there were 439 calls for service and the police impounded 70 cars. In 2022, drivers kicked in the windows of several police cruisers at another unsponsored event. In April, 2021, right in the heart of the pandemic, around 100 people gathered at an intersection in North Toronto. They set the road on fire with gasoline and did burnouts around the flames – the resulting videos were impressive enough in that barbed-wire-tattoo, fireball-whiskey-shot, slo-mo-walking-in-a-group kind of way. When the police came, the takeover crew swarmed the cruisers and fled. An hour later they reformed near the Toronto Zoo and set the road on fire again.
Another video I saw on YouTube from 2020 shows a Dodge Charger drifting around a burning pillar of tires, a passenger leaning out the window with a carrot-sized joint spreading his arms like a stoned bearded eagle. Later, in the same video, another driver loses an edge and crashes, not the first crash of the night according to the gleeful spectators. Guided by a hype man in a safety vest and a megaphone, the crowd scatters as the police arrive.
Ordinary meetup people, people who just love cars, hate these people. They’re the product of social-media fuelled malignant narcissism. “A lot of it boils down to immaturity,” Mr. Figliomeni says. “Their intent, their sole purpose in going to this meet, is to sow chaos, ‘I’m going to start shit because I want attention.’ ” There’s a class distinction, too, between the meetups and the takeovers. The impression the takeover crews leave on the meetup people is spoiled rich brats driving daddy’s cars.
“A lot of it is that entitlement. Everyone that I know who works a nine to five, they cherish their cars. Number one, they’re not willing to lose it. Number two, they’re not willing to total it.”
Seriously powerful vehicles have grown more accessible to people with money. A Dodge Challenger Hellcat, just under $70,000, has more than 700 horsepower. Even an Audi A3 can do zero to 60 in six seconds. That’s a lot of power if you can trick your dad into letting you drive it.
Takeover crews live by social media, and they die by social media. The secret weapon of the High-Risk Traffic Unit isn’t the undercover cops or the helicopter. It’s an anonymous road safety specialist who works at Open Source Intelligence Gathering, or OSINT. She’s on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, posing as an enthusiast in order to gather information on where the meetups and takeovers are happening. But she also gathers direct evidence. On April 20, 2020, a video went viral showing drifters on the corner of Yonge and Dundas in the heart of downtown Toronto. The police arrested the driver. In 2022, Danial Loganathan, a 27-year old Newmarket motorcyclist, allegedly posted a video of himself driving along the 400 at 260 km/h. The police retweeted his video and then arrested and charged him.
Viral crime is a paragon of criminal stupidity, the very summit of idiot mountain. Think about it: For the sake of attention, they record themselves breaking the law. The attention comes. They themselves have provided the evidence used to convict them. It doesn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to crack these cases. Catching clout chasers this way doesn’t even qualify, properly, as police work. The road safety specialist isn’t a cop. She’s a young woman with a laptop, telling guys they have cool cars online. It’s almost too easy.
In the parking lot in Brampton, at around 9:30 p.m., the police decide they’ve had enough. The five police cruisers lurking on the edges siren up and roll through, their loudspeakers blaring a recorded message: “Exit the parking lot immediately.” In person, the officers are more direct: “Get out of here.” The crowd pours into their vehicles; the vehicles pour onto the highway. For the night, the bobbing and weaving between the drivers and the police ends peacefully. But the drivers will just move to some other spot, in Etobicoke, in Scarborough, wherever.
The street racing scene in the GTA obeys fundamental laws of geography. Like rare species of orchids, it springs up where certain precise conditions allow it to flourish, large empty parking lots near highways near empty industrial areas beside residential developments. These are places where kids gather near places where kids can race beside places where the noise bothers people who complain to the police. The most effective strategy against the takeovers in the Windflower Gate Mall wasn’t the helicopter or the OSINT specialist. It was installing parking blocks. They make it impossible to pull out dramatically, to look cool doing it.
And that’s what the clout chasing is all about. It is a pursuit of beauty, and people find beauty where they find it. Some find it in butterflies. Some find it in furniture. Some find it in ballet. Some find it in cars. Toronto is an emerging megalopolis – a city where condo developments promote units starting at $1.6-million and the buildings are still hideous, where grey-black plastic is becoming the definitive urban look, and the non-committal corporate midness of a bank branch lobby is the aesthetic ideal. Toronto looks best at night, from the highway, when you can’t really see it. The beauty and risk-taking of the clout chasers is an organic reaction to the city’s furiously expanding banality, a way of finding, in the ugliness of the roads and the stupidity of social media, a way of meaning.
The drivers kicked out of Brampton flood the 410. I’m speeding home, but a Corvette Stingray streaks past me like I’m standing still and, a half second later, a BMW M4 on the other side comes out of nowhere. They’re heading somewhere to be meaningful to each other. The police can move the meetups around, and they can break up the takeovers, and they can arrest the street racers. The cops can chase the clout chasers. Nobody can stop the chase.