Mid Night Club

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This article is about the Japanese street racing gang. For the video game, see Midnight Club.

The Mid Night Club is a Japanese street racing gang that hosted illegal races on the Bayshore Route (known natively as the Wangan) of the Shuto Expressway between Tokyo to Yokohama, the gang became one of the most notorious and one of the highly respected clubs of its type, which led to it being featured in over 200 editorial features in most of the leading Japanese auto magazines and even Denmark's Autoviz, Max Power in the UK and the USTurbo magazine which gave street racing in Japan a worldwide notoriety. The club was regarded as one of the longest running street racing gangs.

To join the club, which was formed in 1985, is not as easy as the other clubs as they are governed by a series of rules and were better organised unlike other groups, the hashiriya's (a native term for street racer) car must be capable of going over 250km/h as with the racing speed of over 300 km/h are common, as new member are regarded as apprentices for one year, they are required to attend all the meetings. Only 10% of drivers would qualify for full membership and they would have to leave if they pose a danger to other motorists and to other members. Member would bear the trademark Mid Night sticker in the bumpers, a larger but with a clear background on the sun visor area and sometimes the Mid Night Racing Team on the side skirt. The high standard of the drivers made it difficult for the police to catch them.

In average, there are 30 members in the club, where they meet in a gas station at Yokohama as the name implies, at midnight and races would take place on the Bayshore route to another gas station in Tokyo

As cars are capable of performing over 320km/h, cars are capable of reaching over 400-600 bhp and with one member rumoured to be spending over $2million on rebuilding and modifications on his Porsche 911, the driver’s profession are never revealed as within club policy, members are not allowed to ask how the other members got the money for the modifications from. Only Max Power in 1995 revealed the professions of two drivers (one RX-7 FD3S owner who is a property developer and the other who drives a Skyline R32 GT-R ran his family run car sales business) who had their cars featured.

The club was disbanded in 1999 when a group of Bōsōzoku were waiting for the club to "play" with them as they were racing down the expressway, which ended up in a resulting accident which six bikers ended up in hospital and one was killed, as with the club policy, if such happened, the club would be disbanded immediately and forever. Since then there have been numerous imitators, but with tighter traffic laws to make things difficult, as a result most of such groups have since been disbanded.

[edit] Source

• From a article featured in Jan 2000 edition of Later.
• Overboost.com