The skinny kid throws down his hands and two-dozen tires dig into the asphalt. Cars whip past, their tailpipes blasting a nasty chorus as they disappear into the darkness.

It's just after 1 a.m., an unruly hour at the edge of the Everglades when traffic on U.S. 27 gives way to the whims of young men in muscle cars and mean little imports with engines beefed up for speed.

Tomorrow they'll race again. Drivers barely out of high school will test themselves on any South Florida road that is long and straight, from the busy lanes of Interstate 95 and U.S. 441 to the desolate stretches of U.S. 27 and the Bee Line Highway.

Police are often minutes away, waiting in the dark, many of them fed up with this endless game of high-octane cat-and-mouse.

This year, state legislators have given police a new weapon -- stiffer penalties in Florida's 2-year-old street racing law. If the governor signs the bill into law, convicted racers could face a year in jail and lose their cars.

Now, if only police could catch them.

"Hey you! You wanna go? Wanna go?"

John Wurms, a stocky 18-year-old from Deerfield Beach, jogs around the Krispy Kreme parking lot in Boca Raton looking for someone to beat.

The hot rods had started pulling in just after sundown, arriving all at once in a buzzing swarm of turbochargers.

On Saturday nights, the doughnut shop on Palmetto Park Road is one of the best places to find a race.

On Mondays, the place to be is the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot on Glades Road west of Boca Raton. On Wednesdays, it is outside Speed Indoor Racing, a go-cart track on Powerline Road in Oakland Park.

There are many others, and the gathering spots shift as police hunt them down.

The drivers, mostly guys, say they come for the camaraderie; for the long, gear-headed chats, to sniff under each other's hoods.

But the mixture of teenage machismo and high-performance cars can be intense. Drivers taunt rivals they think they can beat. They "call out" fellow racers for quarter-mile sprints on neighborhood roads or lengthy hauls along the interstate.

Sometimes the challenges come in advance on a locally operated street racer Web site that boasts 3,000 registered users.

"Racing keeps a lot of kids from doing other things like drugs and drinking," says Peter Burchell, a 22-year-old chef from Fort Lauderdale, while setting up races outside Speed Indoor Racing. "Really, there's a lot worse things we could be doing."

Wurms says he started racing at 16, the same day his father bought him a Ford Focus. A guy revved his engine at a stoplight in Margate, and Wurms responded by flooring it.

A month later, Wurms says he ran his first race for money, winning $50 against a Honda Civic.

Each contest made his heart thump. Racing was better than sex, he says, a thrill that left him wondering what he could do to make the Focus go faster.

"It's just the adrenaline, you know?" Wurms says. "A 10-second race will get your heart pounding for an hour. ... I've passed up going home with some girls some nights so I could race."

Nothing has given him much reason to stop. Not his parents, who are both Broward Sheriff's deputies. Not even a three-car pileup that totaled his car and crushed his left hand.

No, Wurms says, he loves racing too much to follow the speed limit.

"You wanna go?"

Before midnight, Wurms lines up a race with two cars and a truck; they follow him onto Military Trail.

They dominate the road immediately, driving side-by-side at a 20-mile-per-hour "roll," a creeping formation meant to open lanes ahead while clogging traffic behind for police or anyone who might get in their way.

Cole Wehrheim, a 19-year-old from Pompano Beach, pulls his Honda Civic SVT even with Wurms. Chris Tesh, 22, follows in a tan Ford Ranger pickup truck with Andre Williams, 18, of Sunrise, at his side in a Hyundai Tiberon.

When the road clears, Wurms and Wehrheim take off, their modified engines thrusting them forward at more than 100 miles per hour.

"There they go," says Tesh, who lives in Greenacres. "Cole's got him, I think."

After a few seconds, Tesh grins at Williams. He stomps on his accelerator.

"Now we're going," Tesh says.

It's a surprise -- he was supposed to stay behind and block traffic. His passenger, Andrea Calvagne, 20, of Lake Worth, lets out a yelp and jams her feet on the dashboard, as if that could stop her from crashing through the windshield.

She's not wearing a seat belt.

With a groan, the Ranger roars into the 90s and the trees whip past. Calvagne grabs onto the door handle in a final effort to protect herself as the truck barrels toward Wurms, Wehrheim, and the twinkle of brake lights ahead.

"Ugh," she moans. "I've driven with him before."

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Walton is tired of waiting for them.

He shifts into gear and drives to a racer hangout next to a Dunkin' Donuts on Glades Road. A few dozen teens stare as he cruises past their cars. "I wish the sheriff gave us a Mustang or two," Walton says. "Something faster to catch up to them."

A few hours earlier, a woman in a canary yellow Mustang gave Walton a quick smile before hitting the gas on Boynton Beach Boulevard. She was racing her boyfriend, who was in another car, and Walton could only catch one of them.

The woman did what police say many racers do: She ran.

Within an hour, Walton found the Mustang unoccupied in a neighborhood a few miles away and impounded it. The woman turned herself in a few days later, and was cited for eluding police, street racing and driving on a suspended license.

Many racers see police as the ultimate challenge. Even at the outskirts of town, where racers are easy to spot, they've learned to take off in several directions and disappear into neighborhoods when they see a patrol car.

On U.S. 27 in northwest Miami-Dade County, street racers by the hundreds turn the road into their own private drag strip. It takes a lot of police to stop them.

"We'll send in young-looking police officers with cameras to get video of the race, then we'll basically shut down the road from both sides," says Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Julio Pajon.

But roundups take time and preparation, Pajon says. In two years, he says, FHP has tried it only twice at this problem spot.

"Sometimes there's so many cars," says Deputy Ruben Cruz, who patrols southern Palm Beach County with Walton. "You can only get one, so you have to look for the most aggressive one, the one that's most likely to run a stoplight."

As Walton pulls out of the parking lot on Glades Road, his supervisor calls on the cell phone and tells him to get moving. A street racer just smashed into another car on Military Trail, near Cresthaven Road.

He turns on his lights and blasts up I-95 at 110 mph. It's a gut-wrenching speed, but Walton says he needs more.

"A lot of times the kids are going to be faster than I am," Walton says. "If they blow by me at 90, and I'm stopped on the side of the road, I've got to go 120 just to catch up to them. And I've got to slow down at the intersections -- I can't just blow through them without looking like they do."

On Military Trail, paramedics are strapping an injured driver to a backboard. Walton steps out of his cruiser and hurries through a tangle of car parts to a crowd of deputies in the road.

A white Civic is spun around, facing traffic with a smashed front end. About 50 feet away, a dark blue Chevy slumps over its three remaining wheels, totaled. A crescent-shaped dent cuts two feet into the passenger's side where police think the Civic hit at 90 mph.

Inside both vehicles, the air is putrid with a chemical funk -- the pressurized gas that deployed the airbags.

Witnesses tell police they saw the Civic streaking along Military Trail in a race with another car when the Chevy made a U-turn in front of them.

The driver of the Civic went to the hospital with minor head trauma and facial cuts. The other racer took off after the crash. The Chevy driver, who was not racing, was uninjured.

"Look," Walton says, wandering through a mess of shattered fiberglass. "This is the aftermath. This is what can happen."

David Reyes Jr. of Wellington eases onto his parents' leather sofa and flips on a home movie showing how he looked before street racing took away his dreams.

It's a DVD of his old tae kwon do tournaments, when he had hopes of competing in the Olympics. The figure on the screen bounces from foot to foot, taunting his opponent.

"They used to call me `horse legs' because I could kick so hard," says Reyes, 21, cracking a smile.

Some people finally stop street racing because of injury or age. Even then, it's tough to leave the scene altogether.

Reyes crushed his spine in 2001 while riding in a race car that crashed on Aero Club Drive in Wellington. After intense physical therapy, Reyes still walks with a severe limp.

He still owns two fast cars -- a red 2002 Mercedes that does the quarter mile in 13 seconds and a 1994 Mazda RX7 twin turbo that's just a half-second slower. Reyes says he wants to fix them up and enter them in car shows.

"How do you explain it?" he says, limping over to where his two race cars glimmer in the sunlight. "It just pumps you up."
Len Monserrat of Miami knows the feeling.

The 30-year-old spent much of his youth charging up and down vacant streets in a red 1991 Mitsubishi Eclipse.

As he got older, Monserrat understood why people thought he was reckless.

But Monserrat never stopped racing -- he just became a professional. He travels around the country, racing a custom-made Eclipse that runs the quarter mile in a blazing 7.6 seconds.

These days, he tries to corral street racers and send them to Moroso Motorsports Park in unincorporated Palm Beach County, the only legal drag strip in the region. Broward and Palm Beach county police do the same, hoping that teens will satisfy their need for speed in a controlled environment.

"It's in their blood," Monserrat says. "They're just going to do it."

But it's always a tough sell in South Florida, he says.

Well west of West Palm Beach, Moroso is more than a 120-mile round trip for racers from Fort Lauderdale. And young racers usually have to wait in line for an hour before they can compete. Sometimes, the best part of going to Moroso is driving home, Wurms says.

"Let's get out of here," he tells his friends one night at Moroso after waiting 31/2 hours for two runs.

The group decides to go for one last race -- on I-95. One speeds ahead a few miles and checks for cops. When he calls on his cell phone with the all-clear, Wurms takes off against a friend in a yellow Ford Focus.

They weave in and out of traffic, their tough little engines growling through modified tailpipes.

Wurms crosses over to the fast lane and zooms by a crowd of cars as he pushes past 130 miles per hour. The shockwave smacks the other vehicles as if a subway train flew by.

"I had to go top speed just once tonight," he says.

By the time his friend gets to the same spot, Wurms is long gone. His brake lights shrink to an intense red blip before disappearing in the sea of early morning traffic.

Chris Kahn can be reached at cmkahn@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4550.

Story by: Staff Writer Chris Kahn