Since May of 2025, Sundays in the Sheffield neighborhood of Northeast Kansas City, Missouri, have gotten much louder and busier with an influx of car enthusiasts who have a passion for drifting and sideshows. Hundreds of spectators surround the perimeter of a massive asphalt pit, gathered to watch an assortment of souped-up cars doing donuts, burning rubber and spitting fumes at explosive speeds.
20-year-old Colin Jones is known as “Vegas Baby” in the community because of his flamboyant demeanor.
“It's a mesmerizing sensation,” Jones said. “I guess … back in the day … it was going out to the drag races, soupin' up their '70s cars. Our version is different. It's modern times and we like to get our car sideways.”
Surrounded by scrap yards and auto shops, The Throttle Dome provides a legal, relatively safe space for extreme drivers to showcase their stunts. Owner Desmond Logan started the business to offer an alternative to the illegal exhibitions of automotive tricks that have become an escalating plague on Kansas City’s urban streets and vacant lots in recent years.
It’s a recreational refuge for Jones, who is now a regular at The Throttle Dome. In the past, he’s taken part in the illegal sideshow scene in private parking lots and public streets. He said now he won’t ever go back to public places.
“As a driver myself, obviously it's stupid because you (now) have places you can legally do it,” he said.
Jones drives a shiny red mustang adorned with black racing stripes. He said people look at it and suspect it’s ordinary. But they’re underestimating its power.
“Honestly, a lot of people don’t like this car because they think it doesn’t have horsepower,” said Jones. “But you get it welded and nothing under the hood, just a straight stock 4.0, and this thing is going to rip.”
Aiden Hubbard, 17, is showing off his red C6 LS3 Corvette on a recent Sunday afternoon, when the roaring engines at The Throttle Dome are loudest. Hubbard admits a friend got him hooked on illegal sideshows several years ago.
“He was, like, 'let's go to a sideshow,’ and I was, like, OK!" Hubbard said. “I saw people drifting their cars and it was so awesome!"
It didn’t take long for him to get into trouble with the police.
“I’ve gotten spike stripped before, and my tires went flat,” he said. “I was a sideshow nerd.”
Start your engines
The Throttle Dome is named for Desmond Logan’s son, who he nicknamed “Young Throttle,” a nod to his son’s fascination with the drifting scene. A used car salesman who prides himself on being fair and serving those who may not otherwise get loans, Logan saw a business opportunity in providing this controlled environment.
Walking the property, cleaning up oil slicks and talking to mechanics and junkers, Logan said he’s proud of what he’s established over the last several months.
“This is the safest place to be as far as the car community,” he said. “We control it! There's no guns, no grenades, no knives, nothing like that. We take all that out right there at the front.”
Logan’s long been concerned about violence in his community.
In 2017, he started “Smoke Your Tires, Not Your Homies,” a sideshow event he intentionally staged near 59th and Prospect Avenue, a neighborhood with a disproportionate amount of violence and criminal activity. Logan said at the start of the shows, he was transparent about his previous dug activity and brushes with the law.
“I apologized because I felt like I had to do something,” he said. But he soon realized his words rang hollow at an illegal event in the streets. “You can’t go to an (illegal) sideshow and say, 'let me talk to you (about crime).' But when you have a controlled environment with a loudspeaker, I can say what I want to say.”
In the past several years, unsanctioned sideshows have led to a number of incidents of gun violence and injuries. In 2020, six people were injured by gunfire at Meyer Boulevard near Swope Park. In 2023, Thomas Lewis, 20, was shot multiple times attending a sideshow with his mother in almost the same spot. He was pronounced dead when police arrived at the scene.
Logan has hired private security to monitor people who come in the space, and what they bring with them. He’d like for officers of the KCPD to show up, if just to connect with some of the young people they are arresting for illegal activity on the streets. He says he’s invited them, but no one from the department has paid them a visit.
“When do we have a chance to talk to the police just on a conversational basis?" Logan wondered. “When does a kid get a chance to just walk up and talk (to an officer.) Never."
Sideshow pushback
Across the city at the intersection of Broadway and Southwest Blvd., KCPD Sergeant Phillip DiMartino surveys what used to be a hotspot for sideshows, until the city installed rumble strips. Corrugated, raised strips, they create grooves in the street, designed to shake the speeding vehicle and send an audible vibrating noise from the tires into the interior of the car.
DiMartino said he’d like to see sideshows eliminated, whether they’re controlled or not.
“These vehicles have crashed out, and they've been involved in accidents," DiMartino said. “People have been hurt. We've posted numerous stories about our officers being assaulted or other community members being assaulted as a result of some of these activities. Maybe they're just a little too dangerous to be doing, regardless.”
DiMartino said he believes heightened awareness, complaints from the community and enforcement are helping their efforts to crack down on sideshow activity.
“Can I say that's because of the rumble strips? I don't know," he said. "I think a big part of it is that we are out there enforcing it.”
The numbers suggest that sideshows are still a big problem. Police have issued 172 citations to both participants and spectators so far this year. There were roughly the same number in all of 2024.
Pit appreciation
Colin Jones was watching his friends zoom forward, in circles and sideways in the pit as he prepared to take his flashy red mustang in.
Racing culture is huge in Kansas City, he said, and the community needed The Throttle Dome because in the past, there haven't been any safe or legal places to perform.
“It was everything that we could have dreamed of in one place," he said. "We don't have any racetracks. We don't even have any dirt tracks. What Kansas City really is — it's lowriders, nice cars, big donks. It's everything and there's nowhere to show them off.”
