Personally, I've found the best street races to be with the off duty PD officers... but barring that, any reponsible person can street race.
Few tips.
1) Choose an empty roadway. (Highways are actually great because they generally do not have telephone poles and side streets.)
2) Case out your intended race track... Drive down it one way, leave a person with a FRS radio there to watch for traffic and the PD, and then drive back to the next exit for example and post another person there....
3) No PD, no traffic, setup and RACE!!!
4) Get done, pick up your lookouts and leave the area as you found it. Empty.
Side roads with minimal cross streets are good too. Just watch out for telephone poles, driveways and irrigation ditches. (All can be deadly.)
As far as speed being the problem... What a crock of shit! The PD knows that speed does not kill, and the mantra "55 stay alive" is also crap.
You don't need to be going very fast to die. It's the way you decelerate that kills you. If your body/head stops too fast, your brain smashes into the skull bones, and your internal organs smash into your ribs/abdomen and are damaged. Either the brain or organ damage can kill you.
I firmly belive that after 10+ years of investigating car crashes, and nearly 24 years of driving experiance, that the following reasons are at the heart of any crash or loss.
1) Inattentive driving. (IE: Doing anything other than paying attention to driving the car.)
2) Lack of experiance or skill. (IE: You need to learn how to drive.)
3) Too fast for conditions. (IE: When there is snow and ice on the road, don't over drive your tires grip.)
Note that too fast for conditions is not "speeding" in the classic sense. In some conditions, 5mph is the right speed of travel. In others, 75mph is clearly not a problem. On an empty freeway going across Montana, Nevada or any of the other Western and Mid Western states, 150mph is not a problem. (But you have to pay attention, have your car in good order, and the traffic around you has to be trained to anticipate those speeds.)
Case in point?
Autobahn in Germany. Very high speeds, very highly trained drivers, and they actually have a LOWER fatality rate per million miles traveled than the USA highway/freeway system.
So, the next time some joker says "Speed kills" ask about the autobahn being safer per miles driven than our speed controlled highways and then discuss the real reason people crash their cars. Inattention, inexperiance and poor judgement on weather conditions.
PS. Hope your friends all live to learn how to drive. Go take a motorcycle MSF course, and it will talk about traction pies, the same applies to your car, only you don't fall down when you run out of pie, you just slide out of control...