LODZ, POLAND - People drag-race on the main avenue here in broad daylight, and the police just stand by and watch. That is, until the commissioner steps up to hand trophies to the winners.

Gleaming BMW M3 sports cars mingle with souped-up speedsters in the form of stubby Fiats -- and everything in between.

"Are you kidding me? Suzuki never made a blue engine," one of the organizers shouted, after popping a car's hood during the prerace inspection.

A newly flush Poland has a new hobby: cars, and the faster, the better. Nowhere is that more clear than in the country's second most populous city, where municipal officials struggled in recent years to deal with an explosion in the number of illegal races on public streets and a raft of complaints from residents nearly driven off the road by them.

"You have young people with powerful machines that until recently older people would have to work their entire lives to afford," said Jaroslaw Woloszynski, the police commissioner. The police said cracking down on the activity was difficult, because racers would just stop their cars when officers arrived; handing out a few tickets for violations was usually the best they could do.

As a result, municipal leaders in Lodz decided that if you can't beat them, organize them. They set up events in which proud car owners, overwhelmingly young and largely male, could challenge one another head-to-head over a quarter-mile of closed road downtown.

The monthly events, called Street Legal, have made Lodz's racers the envy of others in Poland and earned the city the unofficial title of the country's street-racing capital.

A generation ago, Poles living under communism had to wait years to own a car, if they were ever able to. The political changing of the guard made automobiles more available, but they were still out of reach financially for many families. Poland's recent economic success, coupled with the ease of importing used cars from Western Europe since the country became a member of the European Union in 2004, has meant a surge in car ownership.

"Because we were christened the capital of street racing, we decided to live up to the name," said Lech Ryszewski, 60, chairman of the Lodz Automobile Club and a former rally driver and stuntman.

"The Polish soul has always been drawn to horses," he said, citing the country's proud cavalry tradition, "and today it's horsepower."

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