Out of a cloud of smoke, the car comes hurtling at me – a high-speed turn sending it sliding sideways in a move known as ‘drifting’. It’s so fast that all I see are headlights.

The echo of rattling exhausts ricochets around the retail park in Basildon, Essex. The air tastes of burnt rubber and my eyes sting with metallic dust. Then the back end of the car whips around, skidding past within centimetres of my feet.

I leap backwards. Others around me in the crowd don’t – that’s part of the thrill.

As the smoke clears, I realise there are hundreds of people here, mostly teenage boys and young men, crowding ever closer to the kamikaze drivers, arms stretched above their heads to capture the best angle with their phones.

There are children, too, some in pyjamas, clambering over one another for a better view. People have scaled empty containers to get on to the roof of a Primark warehouse, their legs dangling over the edge, eyes fixed on the scene as another car gears up to perform.

Suddenly, I’m pushed aside as three young men perhaps in their early 20s dart into the path of a Honda S2000. It swings around, they leap over the back of it one after another, timing each jump as the rear end sweeps past them. The last one mistimes it and falls flat on the tarmac.

‘If you’re going to stand at the front, it’s not safe,’ someone shouts at the group I’m wedged inside.

‘This is illegal, right?’ I yell over the pops and bangs of the exhausts to a short kid next to me. I’m deliberately wearing what seems to be the uniform – a bandana pulled over the bottom half of my face, hoodie and baggy jeans – but in truth I’m an interloper here.

‘Uh, yeah,’ he replies, laughing at me. ‘First time?’

Third actually. For months, I’ve been investigating the world of Britain’s boy racers for the Daily Mail’s Underground: UK series, from apparently family-friendly car meets to illegal ‘drifting’ scenes after dark like this one where drivers perform high-risk stunts just feet from spectators.

What I find is a culture fuelled by adrenaline, competition and danger – and by an ever-growing online audience desperate for more.

Boy racers are nothing new. In the early 1990s, Oxford’s Blackbird Leys estate was notorious for joyriding youths executing handbrake turns and high-speed stunts. Television crews turned it into a national spectacle; drivers filmed one another on camcorders and the publicity was blamed for inspiring copycats.

Today, though, the crowd is its own news crew. A stunt once witnessed by a handful of friends can now be filmed, uploaded and watched by millions within minutes. But what happens when showing off to your mates becomes deadly?

In recent weeks, the deaths of five young men and two police officers on the A66 near Middlesbrough and of five teenage boys on an Irish motorway have put dangerous driving for kicks and clicks back in the headlines – and pressure on the platforms where such hair-raising antics are shared and celebrated to take action.

When I first started to look into this anarchic world, the meets were surprisingly easy to find. Public posts on TikTok and Instagram advertised gatherings across east London and the Essex coast. They tended to take place in a landscape of suburban teenage hangouts – roundabouts, retail parks, Nando’s and McDonald’s.

On a Saturday evening in Barking, for example, I ran up the concrete stairs of a multistorey car park, following the rumble of engines from above. On the top floor, under the yellow lights, were parked rows of ‘sleepers’ – ordinary-looking cars hiding powerful, souped-up engines. Most of the crowd looked under 18 and were clearly hoping to cadge a ride with the older boys behind the wheel.

When word spread of another gathering in Dagenham, my cameraman and I climbed into one attendee’s battered car and followed others to an industrial estate, where vehicles were already tearing around roundabouts while bass music thudded from those parked nearby.

And then the blue lights appeared. The police broke it up and we went home. Only later did we realise that the meet had simply moved on to another venue.

A few days later, a meet on the seafront at Southend looked comparatively wholesome. Modified cars, their suspension lowered almost to the tarmac, with oversized alloy wheels and unmuffled exhausts, crawled along the strip beneath flashing lights as families wandered between them and the arcades, armed with candy floss and vinegary chips.

But the petrolheads at this benign event know danger can explode at any moment. One man described the moment ‘the one idiot’ turns up and starts doing doughnuts – spinning the car round in tight circles, tyres smoking. Someone gets hit, police descend and ‘that’s it, game over’.

But that wasn’t going to happen here surely? ‘No, it happens at the afterparty.’

I soon realised there wasn’t just one kind of car meet. There were the family-friendly displays and slow-moving cruises through towns to showcase the supercharged vehicles. But then there were the illicit parties afterwards, with doughnuts and perilous ‘drifting’ in front of crowds, or races on public roads.

The two worlds are not entirely separate. It was through people I met at the friendlier meets that I first heard about the most extreme events. One regular helped me infiltrate the private Telegram groups of two street-racing crews, Reckless Meetz and London Street Racers.

My contact forwarded me videos from earlier London Street Racers gatherings that I could use as ‘proof’ I’d been to a meet before. Then, one Saturday evening, the pin dropped in the Telegram group – a postcode.

We were on the move. Somewhat recklessly, I accepted a lift from one of the organisers. He shot forward, speeding down a dual carriageway, weaving in and out of traffic and overtaking at frightening speed, as, from the back seat, I gripped the headrest in front of me. Behind us, a stream of modified cars, many, I guessed, travelling at twice the speed limit, followed to the retail park outside a B&Q in Basildon where, amid a gathering of hundreds, the Honda would come at me out of the smoke.

Later, a rumour began spreading that the police were on their way. People were sprinting back towards their vehicles, engines fired up and the car park emptied almost as quickly as it had filled.

We didn’t have long to wait before another pin dropped in the Telegram group, and it became a game of cat and mouse. That night the meet surfaced in four places – Southend, Basildon, Newham and another venue my cameraman and I never made it to – with convoys of cars tearing between them.

Each new location seemed to draw in more people. At one, a man in a pig costume stood in the crowd waving a flare; nearby, someone in a Hannibal Lecter mask hung out of the back of a car boot. It felt like a rave crossed with a travelling circus.

And each time a driver inched closer to the crowd, tyres screaming, the car appearing out of control, spectators pressed forward rather than back, cheering and egging him on. One man I’ll call Joel was revelling in being at the heart of the chaos. He pulled up the leg of his shorts to show me the letters LSR – London Street Racers – inked across his thigh. Minutes earlier, I’d watched him jump on to the back of a car with smoking tyres before jumping off as it tore away. He told me he’d been run over ‘a few times’.

‘A few years ago you wouldn’t see any videos online,’ he said. ‘Now people come here, they livestream. You’ll just see it plastered all over. I’ve always tried to find something new that someone hasn’t done before. There’s the TikTok dares, where people ask me to do stuff. I do it, I get recognised, then I think, “Right, what’s next?”’

By 4am, I’d had enough. One lad I talked to made a blunt admission: ‘It does encourage people to drive dangerously. I admit it spills on to the roads. On the way in and out of them, too.’ And the grim examples of what can happen when it does are clocking up.

In 2022, at an illegal street-racing event in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, Dhiya Al Maamoury lost control of a modified Nissan Skyline and crashed into people watching from the pavement, killing Liberty Charris, 16, and Ben Corfield, 19. He was jailed after admitting two counts of causing death by dangerous driving and two of causing serious injury.

Indeed, on social media, dangerous driving reproduces itself endlessly. One speeding clip leads to another until my feeds are full of young men racing, crashing and deliberately ‘baiting’ the ‘pigs’ [police].

I also found a trend dubbed ‘back road bashing’ – drivers speeding along rural roads – with some videos attracting millions of views. I repeatedly came across street-drifting videos captioned ‘AI driver’ or ‘AI generated’, in a strange inversion presenting real footage as artificial to evade moderation by the platforms.

The police are increasingly treating the underground racing scene as a threat. Since January last year, Operation Hercules, a dedicated taskforce set up by West Midlands Police, has convicted 137 people of road offences, with dozens more cases going through the courts.

I was four months into this investigation when a separate tragedy pushed dangerous driving into the national spotlight.

At 3.39am on August 22, a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way down the A66 in Middlesbrough carrying five young men collided head-on with a marked police vehicle. All five men in the Passat died, along with officers PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough. Another police vehicle had abandoned a pursuit of the Passat about ten seconds earlier. Officers later said they were investigating links to serious and organised crime.

New figures this month showed that reports of wrong-way driving on England’s major roads rose by 25 per cent in the year to August and at least one of the young men killed on the A66 had previously posted reckless-driving footage.

I found dozens of similar TikTok videos through connected accounts, hashtags and comments – showing young men speeding, driving off-road and filming themselves while being pursued by police.

Unsurprisingly, young men are disproportionately represented in fatal crashes: male drivers aged 17 to 24 are around four times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than those aged 25 or over.

In one video from March last year, an Audi is filmed in Middlesbrough travelling at around 100mph before leaving the road and racing across paths and parkland behind houses, at one point passing frighteningly close to a child in school uniform.

In August this year, a spokesman for the Prime Minister described the online glorification of dangerous driving as ‘utterly disgraceful’. Days after the Middlesbrough tragedy, Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee demanded answers from TikTok, YouTube, Meta and Snapchat, while roads minister Justin Madders called it a ‘sickening’ trend.

In response, Meta and TikTok said they prohibit content promoting, advocating or encouraging participation in high-risk viral challenges and remove such content when they become aware of it. YouTube said extremely dangerous driving is prohibited on its platform. And Snapchat said reckless driving is explicitly prohibited under its community guidelines.

Six days before the A66 crash, five teenage boys died in County Kildare after their BMW – again travelling the wrong way, down the M9 – hit a car carrying three sisters and a seven-year-old boy on their way to Dublin Airport. Two of the sisters were critically injured; the third and the child were seriously hurt.

It is easy to reduce all of this to testosterone, thuggery and stupidity. In Middlesbrough, some see a more complicated picture. At a community cafe, I met Amanda, who works with young people. She was upset by how quickly people had judged the young men killed on the A66 – and, more broadly, boys like them.

‘I feel sad that we live in a society where we can quite easily jump to a culture of blame,’ she told me. Amanda talked about young people having to navigate what she called ‘broken systems’: patchy education, disappearing youth provision and communities where there may be few affordable ways to fill a day.

‘There’s nothing out there any more for them. Young people just miss out in finding an alternative high.’

While many would disagree with Amanda’s sympathetic interpretation, I wanted to hear from the young men themselves. One of them, Scott, admits: ‘I’m not gonna lie. I am a boy racer. Probably always will be as well.’

Driving fast gave him an ‘adrenaline rush’, he says, insisting: ‘I drive better fast than I do slow.’ Several of the lads agree that the pressure to go harder is greater when somebody starts filming. ‘As soon as the camera’s on, you want to push yourself to maybe a bit more than what you’re capable of when you drive,’ one tells me. ‘And that’s when the accidents happen.’

And yet the cost of their recklessness can be high in human terms – as the families left behind in Middlesbrough and Ireland know too well. The Devanney family, too, know exactly how high a price others pay. On October 21, 2023, Abbie Devanney turned 18. She and her younger sister Amy, then 15, spent hours together getting ready for her birthday celebrations in Newcastle upon Tyne. Unusually, Amy asked for a photograph of them together.

Hours later, Abbie was dead. A passenger in a car driven by Charlie Whittaker, 17, who’d had his licence for just six months, she died instantly when the car hit standing water, struck a tree and rolled. Whittaker had been driving at more than 70mph on an unlit road. Three other teenage passengers suffered life-changing injuries.

Afterwards, police recovered more than 20 videos showing Whittaker driving recklessly before the fatal crash, including speeding and dangerous overtaking.

‘I think it would be easier to process if this was kind of a one-off thing,’ Amy tells me as we sit on Abbie’s memorial bench in Consett, County Durham. ‘But knowing that this was a pattern of behaviour, it was inevitable this was going to happen, and it ended up happening to my sister.’

Whittaker admitted causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving, but Amy says he could serve only a fraction of his five years and four months sentence under Labour’s early-release scheme.

‘What kind of example is that setting?’ she says. ‘I can’t ever forgive him.’

Her fear is that the message will be lost on exactly the kind of young drivers I’ve met in the course of this investigation.

‘Those boys, they believe they’re invincible. There are days when I wake up and I go to speak to Abbie because our rooms are right next to each other...’ She reaches the door before remembering.

I ask Amy what her message would be to those watching online, wanting to test their limits and show off to their mates.

‘Just know how lucky you are that nothing’s happened yet. Stop pushing your luck because something like this will happen to you or someone you know. And it’ll be then that you realise you should have stopped.’