Imagine for a moment you have won the lottery. You decide that with money no longer an object you will buy a really fast car: a Ferrari Enzo, Porsche 911 Turbo or Lamborghini Murciélago.

Taking it for a spin, you come to a set of traffic lights and pull up alongside what appears to be a rather noisy, 30-year-old banger. Smirking slightly, you resolve to flaunt your new toy and show the driver of this ageing rust-bucket who is boss.

The light turns green, you slam your foot on the gas but, to your absolute horror and disbelief, your expensive, rakish, cutting-edge supercar is left trailing in the smokey old nail’s wake.

For members of the Surrey Muscle club, who soup up American cars to ludicrous levels of power and acceleration, recounting such scenarios brings wide gleeful smiles.

“You can be driving along the motorway minding your own business and a Porsche or Ferrari comes alongside, prepares to speed off, but then I just drop a cog and I’m gone,” says Jiggy Jarman, 42, a washing machine engineer and musician from Ewell, who drives a heavily modified and supercharged 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle. “It’s just brutal power, basically.”

Unfortunately for proud supercar owners, this is not just idle boasting.

The Murciélago manages 0 to 62mph in a scorching 3.8sec, the Enzo in 3.6, and the 911 Turbo in 4.2sec. However, several of the members of the club have home-improved cars that speed from 0 to 60 in as little as 2.6sec while remaining fully street legal.

Take, for example, Roger Luty, a 55-year-old dairy farmer from Petersfield, Hampshire. Eight years ago he bought a 1971 Oldsmobile 442 for £2,500, and has spent another £15,000 turning it into one of the club’s fastest cars. While the original car had a hefty 370bhp generated by a 7.4 litre engine, Luty’s car now produces up to 750bhp. On the morning the above photograph was taken Luty had already milked 170 cows and shortly afterwards set off home to milk even more. But despite his bucolic occupation, he is a former three times national “burn-out” champion, a title gained in competitions where the aim is to spin the rear wheels to create the maximum amount of smoke in as short a time as possible.

“The crowd love to watch, but it’s not just about showing off — you need to do it to get enough heat in the tyres,” he says.

In front of his gearstick is an insignificant looking switch which the uninitiated might expect to operate the heated rear window, or a foglamp. In fact, flicking the switch “arms” a nitrous oxide system that triggers a burst of extra power. When the throttle pedal is fully depressed, the system sprays the gas into the engine, making the petrol burn far more efficently. Using nitrous oxide is legal, but can be dangerous without soft and sticky racing tyres because the extra power is so great that the cars can all too easily run out of grip.

“You have to be careful that you feed the power in gently, otherwise the wheels will just light up, and you find yourself spinning round and going back the way you came,” says Paul Dodd, 41, who founded the club in 1995.

Dodd, from Epsom, who drives an Oldsmobile Cutlass so powerful it can do wheelies, was brought up on extreme cars. His father, a specialist in automatic gearboxes, created “the Beast”, a 27 litre car built around a Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 aircraft engine. “My father gave me a good education, he sent me to private school, but more importantly he regularly took me drag racing in the Beast,” Dodd says.

All this power doesn’t come cheap. Using nitrous oxide costs £1 a second, and the cars are unlikely to better 10mpg, so during the week, Dodd potters around in a Ford Focus.

The vibrations from the massive engines are so strong that they set off car alarms just by driving past.

The cars are not all from the 1970s, and drivers are not all men. Heather Sayers, 49, drives a 1997 black Chevrolet Camaro SS, modified to give 420bhp. “I love it when you go past kids and they all just say, ‘Wow, look at that’,” she says.

As well as driving on the roads, club members take their cars to compete on drag strips in quarter-mile races lasting just 10 to 12 seconds.

“I enjoy my car best out on the road, though,” says Dodd, “prowling the streets of suburbia with the nitrous oxide system armed and awaiting my next victim.”

That said, and despite the name, the club has a completely unmacho atmosphere. The drivers are egged on not by raucous gangs of greasy rockers, but more often than not by a sweet-looking huddle of their school-aged sons and daughters.