Program Lets Teens Drag Race with the Police!

Every Wednesday at Sonoma Raceway, California high schoolers line up against a real police car for a quarter-mile drag race, and it is completely legal. The program, called Top the Cops, was built by a retired officer who wanted to give teenagers a real outlet instead of a street corner. Now in its 23rd year, it has its own alumni. Watch to see how it actually works.

Every high schooler who has ever gunned it off a stoplight has wondered, for just a second, what it would feel like to race a cop and get away with it. At Sonoma Raceway in California, that fantasy is a Wednesday-night tradition, minus the getting-away-with-it part, because the cop is right there in the next lane, throttle open, and everyone involved signed up for exactly this. What started as one retired officer’s idea to keep teenagers off the street has quietly run for more than two decades, drawing repeat participants, alumni reunions, and a growing list of law enforcement agencies wondering if they should copy it. The results, according to the people who have actually lived it, might surprise you.

A Retired Cop’s Answer to Street Racing

The program is called Top the Cops, and it was founded by Kevin McKinnie, a retired police officer who had spent enough time responding to illegal street racing calls to know that citations alone were not fixing anything. His fix was blunt: if teenagers wanted to race, give them a real strip, real rules, and a real opponent instead of a dark backroad and an unmarked cruiser. Every Wednesday, high school students bring their cars to Sonoma Raceway and line up against a police car for a straight quarter-mile, one on one, sanctioned and timed by track officials rather than a stopwatch on a public street. As of this video, the program was in its 23rd year, making it one of the longer-running diversion programs of its kind in the country.

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Not Street Racing, Drag Racing

One of the most-repeated reactions to this video draws a hard line between what is happening here and what most people picture when they hear about racing against cops. As one viewer put it in the comments, this is not street racing against police, it is drag racing against them, a distinction that matters more than it might sound. Street racing is illegal, unregulated, and happens in live traffic with no safety net. What Top the Cops runs is a closed course, a sanctioned strip, tech inspections, and an officer who volunteered to be there. The teens are not evading anyone; they are racing them, with a green light and a finish line instead of a chase and a pair of handcuffs.

The View From the Passenger Seat

The comments on this video include at least one voice who says they actually went through the program, describing it as a real, formative part of their high school years, and mentioning they made it back years later for a program alumni event filmed the same day as this clip. That detail is worth sitting with: this is not a stunt shot once for a camera crew, it is a recurring community fixture with enough history to have its own alumni gatherings and returning veterans. For a program built around getting teenagers to trust police rather than run from them, that kind of return visit, someone choosing to come back years after they aged out, is arguably the strongest evidence it is actually working.

How Fast Is Fast Enough?

Not every comment is convinced the cops are racing at full effort. Several viewers pointed out the patrol cars look to be running closer to 30 mph than a genuinely competitive pace for a quarter-mile pass. Whether that is intentional pacing to keep the runs close and dramatic for a nervous first-time teenage driver, a limitation of the fleet vehicles being used, or simply officers not wanting to shred a squad car’s drivetrain on a Wednesday night is left unanswered by the video itself. It is a fair question, and it does not undercut the program’s larger point: the value here is not really about who crosses the line first, it is about who shows up at all.

Built to Prevent, Not Just to Entertain

Programs like Top the Cops sit in a specific lane of law enforcement outreach: not a ride-along, not a classroom presentation, but a genuine adrenaline outlet that competes directly with the thing it is trying to prevent. Illegal street racing persists because it offers something legal alternatives usually do not: real speed, real stakes, real spectators, and bragging rights among friends. By recreating that experience inside a sanctioned, supervised environment, McKinnie’s program removes the reason for a teenager to go looking for it on public roads instead, where the stakes involve pedestrians and cross traffic rather than a safety crew and a runoff area. Several commenters, including some describing law enforcement backgrounds of their own, called for more agencies nationwide to adopt a similar model.

A Camera Crew That Was Not the Local News

The clip comes from Great Big Story, a documentary outlet built around exactly this kind of overlooked, human-interest angle rather than breaking news. One commenter admitted they assumed the film crew that day was a local news team covering a routine community event, not a national outlet documenting something rarer than it looks from the stands. That mix-up says something about how normalized this Wednesday-night ritual has become at Sonoma Raceway: to the regulars, it is routine. To everyone watching it for the first time, it is something else entirely, and that gap between the everyday and the remarkable is exactly why the video keeps circulating years after it was filmed.

A Model Other Tracks Have Started Copying

Twenty-three years is long enough for an idea like this to stop being a novelty and start being a template. Diversion and outreach programs pairing police departments with local racetracks have popped up in other states since Top the Cops first launched, each one built on the same basic bet: teenagers who want speed will find it somewhere, and a supervised strip with an officer in the other lane is a far better place for that to happen than an intersection. The comments on this video, filled with people from unrelated departments asking how to start something similar where they live, suggest McKinnie’s original idea has outgrown Sonoma Raceway entirely.

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