By Rory Cahill
It started small, with a black sedan on the top floor of the parking garage, music blaring from a Bluetooth speaker. Then more and more cars showed up, everything from a Toyota Yaris to a classic BMW M3. This is College Park Tuning, the University of Maryland’s very own car club.
“When I was a kid, the first time I saw a really cool car, it was a Lamborghini in Washington, D.C.,” said Eugene Chan, a senior criminology & criminal justice major who’s a long-time member of the club. “I got really excited when I saw it, because it looked really cool, and I’ve been into cars ever since.”
Chan certainly loves cars, but he also enjoys the social aspect of the club.
“I made a lot of friends around here, and half of these people, I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for this club,” he said.
Aditya Eswaran, a senior computer science major, was excited to attend a College Park Tuning meet for the first time.
“I’ve attended a couple Cars and Coffee [casual car meets] in the DMV area,” Eswaran said. “I wanted to see what the on-campus experience is like.”
In addition to parking lot meets like this one, which provide a relaxed environment for car enthusiasts to socialize, the club also organizes cruises to locations outside of campus. Chan estimates that about 80% to 90% of people who show up to the meets have their own cars. But those without cars are still welcome to show up.
“It’s open to everyone to attend,” Chan said. “Just don’t cause any trouble that might get UMPD to shut us down.”
Stopping reckless and illegal driving around their meets has been a constant challenge according to the club’s president, senior business management and marketing major Parsa Faroghi.
“Those people are never with [College Park Tuning],” he said. “They somehow heard about the meets, and they’ll show up, do a drive-by [revving their engines loudly].”
Faroghi is frustrated by how the police have responded to these issues. He said the police associate them with “those few that do the stupid shit, and they go after the only thing that they know, which is CPT.”
The club has been forced to stop posting the location of their events on Instagram for a while, a standard to which other clubs are not held. Faroghi says he met with a police corporal to try to explain the situation, to no avail.
“It seems that they just don’t want the headache that they see us to be, and they don’t even want to have to bother suffering the existence of an organization like this, just so they don’t have to worry about the stray idiot that passes through campus here,” Faroghi said.
He said he’s been threatened several times for student conduct action because of what other drivers have done around the meets, and that some of their meets had been shut down because a “sports car” ran a stop sign at a different part of campus.
“We want to work with them,” Faroghi said. “But they want us to cease to exist for their convenience.”
To Faroghi, the car enthusiast community is about so much more than “TikTok clout chasers cutting up on highways, doing takeovers.” He started attending College Park Tuning meets as a freshman, and says he’s met many of his friends through the club.
“We each like a particular style of car, sometimes, more often than not, very different,” he said.
But their shared passion for cars is what brings them together.
Featured Image: The front corner of a Subaru BRZ sports car at the College Park Tuning meet last Thursday. Photo by Rory Cahill