Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s.
And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc.
It's always been like this...
It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
The car modification scene is only slightly younger than the car.
A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing.
Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races
But honestly, why these lengths specifically?
Many short races, for feet or horses, that started way back when are some number of furlongs.
Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)
It worked out so well because it gave people a way to experience car modding and illegal street racing in their own living room. If people are getting their kicks from street racing games... maybe we should make more street racing movies.
I think the nost blatent was when Tokyo drift came out, the next NfS had drift races.