By Courtland Milloy
Monday, February 18, 2008; B01

From one streetlight to the next, you get a mile or more of smooth, gently rolling asphalt. Indian Head Highway is like that for roughly 30 miles running parallel to the Potomac River, from its beginnings at the Capital Beltway through Prince George's and Charles counties until it dead-ends at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in the town of Indian Head.

You can do a lot of street racing along that stretch.

I live in Prince George's and spend a fair amount of time on the 210 corridor, as some of us call it. As you probably know by now, it's a road warriors' obstacle course.

In the darkness of the early-morning hours, you get the kind of street races that ended Saturday with eight spectators being killed along the highway in Accokeek. But the worst of it occurs in plain sight.

Motorcyclists routinely do quarter-mile wheelies and weave through traffic at 100-plus mph. In the summer, they like to add girls in hot pants to their stunts. On several occasions, they have lost control of their motorcycles and run off the road. One hit a tree so hard that all you could see at the crash site were glittery shards of metal embedded in charred bark.

Then there's the Potomac 500, a.k.a. rush hour. You commuters know what fun that can be. Spend any time in the fast lane and your rearview mirror will quickly fill up with the eyeballs of the driver behind you.

Not to minimize the deaths of the spectators at the illegal street race, but you are far more likely to be killed during an officially sanctioned rush home from work. If you are a pedestrian in the District, you are more likely to be killed by a commuter, a Metrobus or a driver eluding police than a street racer.

I have a friend in his 40s who, until recently, raced cars and motorcycles along Indian Head Highway. Asked why, he said, "It's all about adrenaline." And he didn't need a prearranged midnight showdown to get his high.

He drove a late-model Pontiac GTO with 350 horsepower, and all he had to do was pull up to a stoplight next to a like-minded driver. His last race was with a youngster in a twin-turbocharged Toyota Celica, souped-up foreign economy cars being the muscle car of choice for many Generation X racers.

They raced four miles at speeds that exceeded 160 mph. I could have just as easily been writing about his death. Asked why he stopped racing, he said, "As you get older, you start to realize that life is precious."

Obviously, everybody is not so lucky.

At the prearranged races, the excitement usually begins after the local bars issue last call. Customers turn bottoms up and head for the Country Carpets parking lot, where Pine Drive turns out onto the drag strip.

A side street between the parking lot and the highway allows racers to line up before rolling out to the starting line. From there, drivers have more than two uninterrupted miles of asphalt to run a quarter-mile race.

Spectators watch from the shoulder as racers take off, after which they sometimes wander out of the tire smoke and into the street for a better view.

That's when a passing motorist seemed to have come out of nowhere and hit those who were standing in the street. Brown paper bags, bottles, shoes and body parts were strewed all over the place. The car hit one spectator so hard that he ended up inside, leading police to believe at first that he had been a passenger.

You'd think fans and racers would just rent a night at Maryland International Raceway at Budds Creek.

But, as my friend told me, "It's more fun just to go out and do it." Reminds me of a tag line to a movie from the street-racing franchise "The Fast and the Furious": "If you ain't outta control, you ain't in control."

The reality, of course, is quite different. A lot of drivers are out of control, especially along Indian Head Highway. And there are no ifs about it.

E-mailmilloyc@washpost.com