A car accident that recently took place in Beijing has become a trending topic on the Internet in China. A Lamborghini and Ferrari crashed in a high-speed race in a tunnel near the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing on April 12, the same day the supercar-packed "Fast and Furious 7" premiered in China. The Lamborghini was totaled, and the Ferrari was badly damaged, too. Fortunately, only one person, a female passenger, was slightly wounded in the costly accident.

It goes without saying that luxury cars draw attention on the streets, but when accidents – especially fatal ones – involve such cars, they receive attention of a wholly different kind, where awe and admiration turn into resentment and revulsion.

A flashpoint case happened in east China's Zhejiang Province in 2009, when a modified Mitsubishi sports car flouting the speed limit ran over and killed 25-year-old Tan Zhuo. People called for severe punishment for Hu Bin, the Mitsubishi's driver, with some even wanting the death penalty. While the case had other elements such as a questionable police investigation that added to the public's ire, the fact that the father of Hu Bin was a rich businessman played a significant role in the public reaction to the accident.

Illegal street racing has always been a sport of the rich, as it's a hobby that calls for both money and time.

The Lamborghini in the accident in Beijing, for example, costs more than 4 million yuan, or about US$640,000. The modification of sports cars is also not cheap. As a result, accidents involving fancy cars tend to raise suspicions among the public about the origins of the money spent on them, which only feeds into anger at the rich driver's indifferent or even reckless attitude toward human lives.

Since most races are held at night when traffic is lighter, participants in illegal racing usually sleep in. One of those late risers was Chen Zhen, who used to be an iconic figure in the underground racing circles in Beijing and the first of the "13-Minute Boys," a moniker given to the mostly young and male drivers who can complete a circuit of Beijing's Second Ring Road within 13 minutes. To achieve that feat, a driver has to drive at a speed of at least 151 kilometers per hour, almost double the road's speed limit.

After many previous close calls, Chen was finally intercepted by the police during one of his races in February 2006. He was then detained by police for seven days.

Chen's detention put the brakes on the illegal racing scene in Beijing, which first began to rev up in 2001. But as the accident near the Bird's Nest suggests, illegal racing is far from a thing of the past. After his brush with the law, Chen faded from the high-octane world of illegal racing and found a job reviewing cars at a well-known car website. Chen's switch to a normal life may not sound appealing to some diehard fans of street racing. Some of those prodigal sons are not looking to return but to make rubber-burning U-turns.

To deal with those incorrigible racers, police in China have taken heightened measures to combat illegal racing, including initiating targeted policing in areas prone to street racing and establishing a database of drivers with histories of illegal racing.

The best lesson against illegal racing could be what happened in Kunming on the afternoon of October 14, 2013. A white Jaguar F-Type sports car plowed into the green belt on the curb so violently that its driver was thrown out of the car and died instantly upon hitting the ground. The cause of the accident? Speeding.

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