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Hot on the Porsche's tail came the Japanese cars, all blipping their throttles and smelling deeply of brake dust and mechanical heat.

They included an old AE 86 twin cam, rear-wheel-drive Corolla coupe with a sharp exhaust note - perhaps the ultimate drift car, a Subaru Impreza WRX, a Honda Integra, another Integra, a Civic making loud turbo chuff noises, ditto a Chrysler Neon SRT, a BMW M3 bog standard (nice), a gold Nissan 350Z with turbo whoosh, a Ford Mustang V8, then two superb machines, a gun-metal-grey Honda S2000 and a beat-up old grey Nissan 180SX with a dreadfully cool body kit.

They parked at the top of the hill in a rough line and got out to chat. They hadn't been racing on the way up - that was a cruise. The fast stuff would start in an hour, downhill first...

Canyon racing is an illegal street-racing activity started by drifters in the hills of Japan and taken up by import freaks in Los Angeles. It takes place (mostly) in the Carbon Valley, or route 142, starting out of Brea, Orange County, in the sprawl of north-east LA and snaking into the Chino Hills for 18 miles. There are other locations, too, which the racers like to keep to themselves.

These are ordinary car nuts, like you and I. They don't shout about who they are or what they do, but a bit of delving reveals them to be working in fairly ordinary (but well-paid) jobs - some work in the car tuning business, some in IT, and there was even a lawyer and a dentist present. It is almost exclusively a male club - female racers are very rare, but some of the guys' girlfriends turn up.

The whole scene is internet-based - recently, with the launch of the computer game Need For Speed Carbon, they attracted a lot of publicity from US media, thanks to the game's PR arm, which forced them to take their website underground.

There is a strong link with the Japanese import scene, which explains the predominance of Asian faces you see here - V8 muscle cars are rare.

The racers are quite secretive and aren't best pleased about the publicity - a couple of them told me that when they heard 'media' would be present on this Friday night, a call on the web went round to cancel.

Only through the intervention of a close contact, who we'll call 'Miss F' - a canyon racer for some years and as quick a driver as any of the guys - that we managed to convince them otherwise.