The Midnight Club - Japanese Car Culture

The Midnight Club was composed of well-to-do,rich, respectable businessmen. Their goal was simple: to build and race the fastest cars that the world had witnessed so far. They mainly operated within the Bayshore Route in Japan; it’s a coastal motorway that connects Tokyo to Yokohama. This is known as the Wangang, another location that I think will hold importance within my story, but was essential to the Midnight Club. The Wangang was used as a location for some of the most extreme street racing, where cars were pushed to their complete limits. Mostly nowadays, due to Japanese police cars not having a restricted speed of 110 mph and areas being more heavily policed, racing on the Wangang has died out and is much less common. In 1987, the Midnight Club was founded, super relevant to my selected time period. Although there were already lots of street racing gangs in Japan around this time, the Midnight Club was different. They had a highly selective process on how people became members of the club; only highly skilled drivers were even given the chance to race within the club. The process of entry meant that you had to serve as almost an apprentice member for a year; this involved terms like never missing a meeting. Due to the illegality of street racing, the members of the Midnight Club were wanted, seen as it was criminal behaviour to be racing cars like this. To stop the police and authorities from catching on, they would share their meeting locations with adverts in the local newspaper. These ads would read something like advertising something for sale on a night at a meet location. Example being

For Sale Fresh Apples at amazing prices! For more information, come to Daikoku Car Park Friday at Midnight.”

These advertisements only allowed the members to understand, and this would allow them to attend meetings and races. The club was so exclusive that only 10 percent of the applicants were ever accepted; numbers never exceeded 30 members. Manny Young Racers or fanboys of the Club would put ‘Midnight’ club stickers on their cars; this was not a smart idea, as if you were not in the club, it was highly frowned upon to claim the name. This would lead to these fake members’ cars being destroyed and the stickers removed from them. Racing in the Midnight club was all about one thing: top speed! Races were won by reaching the finish line first or getting so far in front that the races were basically ended. There were some requirements to being in the club based around your car. One of these was that your car had to comfortably sit at 160 MPH and maintain those speeds for fifteen minutes, although this was not the top speed of race cars; they would regularly exceed 190-200 MPH in races. The thing that I found absolutely fascinating about this was that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was incredible to know that cars were tuned this fast even back then. Some cars in the club were brand new and then had millions spent on them; there were cars such as Porsches, Nissan Skylines, and Mazda RX7s. Although the most special car above them all was known as the ‘Widowmaker’, this car being a Porsche 930, that had two million pounds of modifications. In my opinion, I think the idea that this car had its own name was incredibly almost threatening; as if you were part of the club, you would know this car meant business. This car was extremely incredible with 700 BHP back then; the fact it was tuned to this extreme was phenomenal. If you lacked the skill to be able to control your car at these speeds, you would be completely kicked out of the club entirely. In 1999, there was a large-scale disaster for the Midnight Club when a race broke out between them and the Midnight Gang. This led to them travelling into a high-traffic area, not something that the Midnight Club would usually associate with, as it was normally open roads in the dead of night. A crash resulted in two bikers in the rival group being killed, and six innocent civilians were hospitalised. Eventually, this led to the club’s abandonment later on.