Put simply, they looked cool as hell and became the envy of the streets. However, the intricate wired rim was modified in 1984, reducing the lips so there was more space between the outer 10 spokes making them poke out much further several inches beyond the front profile of the car, giving a Boudicca-style pronged aesthetic. The original swangas were a 30-spoke chrome rim that Cragar produced for Cadillac Eldorados from 1979–1983. Swangas/elbows refer to two styles of rims that Cragar Wire Wheel Company produced for Cadillac models in the early Eighties: the ‘83s’ and the ‘84s’. “They’re the most important part of a slab – the rims are where it all started.” “They called ‘swangas’ or ‘elbows’,” he says in a syrupy weed daze. Luckily, Josh ‘KandySlabs’ (a mild-mannered Hispanic and slab encyclopaedia) helps explain. These are the story of our streets.” But what about those outrageous wheels? “Where the west coast has lowriders, east has donks, we out here with slabs.
#SIMPSON RACE GEAR FULL#
“Slabs are Houston,” Le$, a rapper and entrepreneur associated with Boss Hogg Outlawz, says in his slow, soft voice that furiously contradicted his loud full body tattoos. We need Les spelt with a dollar sign to decipher what the hell was going on.
To fully understand whatever the hell we have implanted ourselves into, we need a guide. Welcome to Slab Sunday and the start of our most intriguing couple of days crawling into the underbelly of Houston’s most outrageous, interesting and misunderstood car culture: slabs. Knowingly outnumbered and outgunned, their response came in the form of a shrug, having been forced to turn a blind eye. Sandwiching the stretch of road were the police. These scythed chariots would weave across the six-lane highway like a fresher stumbling back from the pub, race on the wrong side of the road and block each other in like they were hunting prey – all while ‘popping trunk’ (again, see the slang list – you’ll be doing that a lot) to reveal neon-lit epitaphs and free the dirty bass reverberating from their oversized sound systems.
#SIMPSON RACE GEAR CODE#
Not giving two hoots to the Highway Code were cars like we’d never seen before – big, lazy luxury American sleds (lots of Buicks, a handful of Mercuries, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles but most notably Cadillacs) with retina-burning candy paint, chopped springs, mismatched grilles and cartoonish protruding chrome wheels.
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