Tonight
Death Race 2007: A Tonight Special

Tuesday 11 December 2007 10:00pm - 10:30pm on ITV1.

Thousands of ordinary people have posted their antics on YouTube and other websites. But what if the stunt in question is illegal and potentially putting lives at risk?

Twenty-year-old Naythan Campbell was sentenced to four months in jail and a three-year driving ban for filming himself on his mobile as he raced down the M65 near Burney at 140 mph, overtaking vehicles on the hard shoulder along the way. Police arrested him after seeing the footage posted on the internet.

But, as Tonight with Trevor McDonald discovers, there are thousands of other postings filmed by and starring young men now being served up as entertainment for the masses on the web.

Tonight reporter Quentin Willson lifts the masks on the young men behind the footage and investigates what the police are doing to stop them.

The programme puts the driving skills of a group of self-confessed boy racers to the test with British Touring Car legend Jason Plato to evaluate how safe they are on UK roads, with startling results.

After several laps around Silverstone, Jason is asked to rate their driving skills. In relation to one of the lads, he says: “He is a real problem. He has zero technique. He is one of the worst drivers I’ve ever sat with and yet he professes to be passionate about driving. He drives quick, he got nicked for driving at 140mph, he is a liability and he is dangerous, he’s a real problem. If he doesn’t slow down he’s going to kill himself and God forbid, he’s going to kill someone else.”

The Tonight team also sets up a panel of experts, including Deputy Chief Constable Adam Briggs of North Yorkshire Police, as well as the head of road safety for the RAC Foundation and a former boy racer, to review the shocking images available for teenagers to watch.

For the first time, Naythan Campbell speaks out on the day that landed him jail and what motivated him to carry out such risky behaviour. The programme also joins Monty and his friends in Medway in Kent to find out exactly what happens on a typical weekend on the roads. Monty runs a video website called Mischief Inc. that showcases his friends' stunts but also accepts homemade films from others driving on British streets.

As cars race by at increasing speeds on a deserted industrial estate, Monty explains: “Well, quite often people come up here around eight nine o’clock they meet up they have a little chat, a little talk, and then what will happen is one guy will decide to show off a little bit. and that will then attract other people to attempt to race him because he’s trying to show off and as a result somebody else will jump in their car and go and follow him and then it will just get faster, up and down, more cars will join in, you can have five or six cars racing alongside each other.”

Monty admits that the video footage that gets the most hits on the Mischief Inc. website is often the most dangerous.

He tells Tonight: “You tend to find the hits, the bigger hits come from the antics, and more the illegal stuff, believe it or not. People want to see illegal stuff. So when you have a video that is labelled illegal, that will normally have the most hits, the most views on any website. You look on websites like YouTube etc they all have the best hits.”

He continues: “I can show you a typical example of the top hitting footage… this one here we have a Volvo at one of the more popular places that people tend to hang out performing some drifting practice here. And as you can see it’s a bit dangerous and if you lose control you will obviously hit something or someone. But it’s what people want to see. If they can’t do it themselves then they’ll go on the internet to watch it because it’s entertainment.”

But these amateur racers don’t just meet in deserted industrial estates; they are burning rubber in residential areas all across Britain. In a recent survey six out of ten young drivers admitted to driving at illegal, life threatening speeds through towns and villages on a weekly basis.

In some cases, these escapades have had tragic results. Stuart Fisher, 17, was out with some mates on a night out in Blackpool when he was hit by a car speeding down the wrong side of the street. The driver was later caught and sentenced to two years in prison for dangerous driving but Stuart has never fully recovered from his injuries.

Stuart, who needs assistance to walk, tells Tonight: “It has totally wrecked my life and not only my family but my friends as well… I have had to relearn everything right from the start, learning how to breathe unaided from a machine and obviously how to speak again.”

So what do our experts think of the footage played to them? The panel watches a biker racing at 176 mph in South Yorkshire – the fastest ever speed recorded on a UK road – that was posted on a website called Live Leak and has been viewed by 220,000 people.

Edmund King, head of road safety at the RAC Foundation, says: “Irrespective of the speed there, those single carriageway rural roads those are our most dangerous roads and what you had there, you had someone doing three times the speed limit, more than three times the speed limit and you had the other guy chasing him – that is absolutely reckless, suicidal, and both of those guys should be taken off the road because others will just follow that example.”

So why aren’t these dangerous drivers being stopped, especially considering their footage is posted in plain view for everyone to see? As Tonight discovers, the police have several major hurdles to overcome before they can take these drivers off the road and the web.