Hello, Kansas City, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast, the number one premier Kansas City car detailing service business in the area. We are so glad that you joined us today and that you’re interested in cars because in case you didn’t know this, we’re unaware, Thomas and I are very interested in cars. This is what we do on a day-to-day basis, but also it is Thomas’s heart and soul is cars and driving and going fast.
This is extremely true. I, outside of performing Kansas City car detailing services, my passion has been racing cars. So everything from street racing to quarter mile drag racing, half mile, standing half mile, rolling half mile.
I love exhibition racing outside of detailing cars. And so today I kind of wanted to talk about something that has really been near and dear to my heart and it’s an event that I used to attend every year. If you’re a car guy, you’ve probably heard of it.
It’s called TX2K or Texas 2K. What is a Texas 2K, Sanford? So it just stands for Texas 2K and then whatever year it is they have like, you know, Texas 2K 19 or TX2K 15. So the first one I attended was in 2016 and I attended from 2016 all the way up to 2020 and, or excuse me, 2019.
And back when I first started doing it, it was kind of more of a private invite type event. So TX2K is a underground street racing, organized underground street racing event where they send out a location the night before the event and you’re supposed to get down to where it’s always in Houston and they, it’s always in a hotel parking lot and they end up turning the entire hotel parking lot into a shop garage. So there will be guys in this hotel parking lot at three o’clock in the morning changing the engine of their car out because they’ll bring a spare engine with them.
So they’ll literally be changing their engine or their transmission. There’ll be guys that are doing all sorts of crazy mechanical work on their cars and there’s really no prize to TX2K, but every year a good friend of mine, Kyle Loftus, who owns 1320 Video, he turns it into a movie. So they put out a trailer and then people can buy it on DVD or they can purchase it on Amazon.
And so as a young kid watching street racing videos, I always wanted to attend TX2K and I didn’t know any of the right people. And by total accident, I ended up becoming very good friends with the guy who produced the movies that I’ve been watching as a young kid on YouTube and ended up getting invited. My first year was in 2016.
I took down a 2004 Corvette with a fully built engine on nitrous. Now, if somebody was going to take their car to some sort of event, is there a Kansas City Car Detailing Service that you would need to refer them to? Absolutely, yeah. You need to give me a call at 620-282-0402.
If you’re looking to have your car detailed before TX2K or street car takeover, give me a holler. I’ll come to you and I’ll do your car at your house. So anyways, I attended TX2K for four years.
It was actually 2015 was my first year and then 2019 was the last year that I went. So I went down, street raced, had a lot of fun and the last year that I went would have been 2019. And the reason I stopped going was it became such a publicized event on social media.
There were guys that were, you know, into media and photography and they would fly in from literally Canada to just take photos and videos of the street race. And the police ended up catching wind of what was going on and people were giving out the meetup spot. They were posting it on Facebook groups and so cops started crashing these events.
What would be something that the police would do if somebody was caught? So if you were caught racing, your car was immediately impounded and you were sent to jail at a minimum for 90 days. If you were caught, they actually passed a bill, Bill 2087. 2087 is what they passed for TX2K specifically.
Anyone within 150 miles of an illegal underground street race could face up to 90 days in jail. So if you were even standing there watching and you were caught, you were arrested. So, um, pretty serious about it.
They were extremely serious about it. And it became so, it became so much of a risk that a lot of the heavy hitters that I used to go down there to want to race against quit coming because, you know, if you’ve got a $700,000 built twin turbo Lamborghini that you’re racing, odds are you’re a very successful person to be able to afford that car and you can’t afford to be in jail for 90 days. So a lot of the that were doing this quit coming.
And, um, my last year was in 2019, but I actually achieved one of my goals as a kid watching these, these street racing trailers for the movie. Um, I always wanted to be on the trailer that they put out before they put the movie out. And the last year that I ran, um, I actually was featured on the trailer.
So that was one of my, that was one of my weird achievements that no one in my family seemed to understand. They’re like, you, you want to, you want to, you’re proud of yourself for being recorded as a criminal. But if you’re a car guy, I mean, you get it.
Like most, most of my car friends understand why we street race, why we love street racing. And, you know, it’s something that I will, unfortunately for the people that love me always do. But the difference is you don’t like doing certain kinds of street racing, unsafe ones, right? Right.
So country road, even, well, even at TX2K, there was a lot of stuff done on I-10, which is the four lane highway that runs straight through Houston. But we weren’t out doing it in the middle of the day. We were out, you know, we wouldn’t start until one o’clock in the morning.
And so there were no cars out. We wouldn’t race around civilians, wouldn’t race around other cars. It was just us.
And, you know, now you see these videos of guys, they do this thing called swimming or, I think it’s either called swimming or, yeah, that’s basically where they’ll find the most packed, heavily congested highway they can, and they’ll try to swim in traffic. And, you know, that ultimately puts other people’s lives at risk versus the type of street racing that we would do was always just us putting our lives at risk. So very different, not really something I’ve ever been interested in doing.
And then, you know, now you have these slideshows that have become really popular and, you know, Kansas City where we live has become a really, really big hub for slideshows and swing meets. And that’s really, in my opinion, kind of killed the car culture because people do stupid stuff, get the cops called on them, you know, they’ll run people over, they’ll run into parked cars. It’s just, it’s so stupid.
So I’m a firm advocate that the good old days of, you know, 20, 30 guys going out in high horsepower Corvettes and Lamborghinis and roll racing on a highway and then going home after and not putting other people’s lives at risk. I’m a firm believer that those days are over. I feel like the younger Instagram crowd kind of ruined it for everyone else.
So if somebody is wanting to get kansas city car detailing to get their car ready for a show or just have you take a look at their car as a former street racer, how would they get a hold of you? You want to give me a call at 620-282-0402. It’s the best way to reach me.
You can also go on my website at bespokerefinement.com. I have a full gallery of all the cars that I’ve worked on and some of the cars that I’ve worked on are street racing vehicles. And then you can also see all of the different packages and Kansas City car detailing services that we offer. So if you want a kansas city car detailing service performed on your vehicle, call us at 620-282-0402.