Drag racing dates back to the 1950s, but police claim it has become far more widespread since The Fast and the Furious turned Vin Diesel, a former bouncer, into a Hollywood star two years ago.

The sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, released in America last weekend and in Britain on Friday, has been accompanied by a rash of high-speed fatalities. The difference this time is the number of women adding nitrous oxide — which gives the car a sudden boost of speed — to their fuel before taking to the streets.

Last weekend hundreds of spectators appeared in an industrial corner of Ontario, east Los Angeles, where a straight half-mile of road was sealed off by a wall of teenagers dressed in their Saturday night finery.

By 8pm the stars had arrived, mostly in surprisingly small but highly modified Nissan and Honda family cars, and the betting started. The stakes ranged from stacks of $100 bills to “pink slips” designating ownership of a car.

One race took 22 seconds, with the winner, an Asian-American in a yellow Honda Civic, scooping the pot from his frustrated competitor, a teenage girl in leather and feathers known to her adoring fans as Mizzy. “I will be back, and then your car is mine,” she shouted at the victor, who had overtaken her in the last 50 yards.

At that moment police sirens were heard and the mixed black, white, Latino and Asian crowd sped off into the night.

Women hot-rodders are everywhere. In Toronto last week 58 cars were seized at illegal races; nine belonged to women. A studio in Sydney is making a film about the female “hoons”, or four-wheel hooligans.

However, one teenage girl who has removed her nitrous oxide canister from her Chevrolet Camaro is Elizabeth Miles, who, at 17, is already a veteran racer near her home in Danville, San Francisco. She got her first provisional licence when she was 15 and has tuned up all her own racing cars since. She competes in official races arranged in central California to lure illegal street racers back on to the straight and narrow.

So are girls better high-speed drivers than boys? “Some of them think about tactics rather than showing off,” said Miles. “I took my canister off because it was damaging the engine and I am in the race for the long haul,” she added.

The outlaw thrill of street racing is tempered by the human cost and not just among the competitors: last weekend a 78-year-old man was knocked down by a speeding driver who told police officers he had just seen 2 Fast 2 Furious. In northern California police arrested six racers who blocked an interstate highway, driving at 120mph. Each had a ticket stub from the movie in their pocket.

Universal Studios, which earned more than £100m from the first film and acknowledged female drivers by introducing a new character played by the model Devon Aoki, has warned would-be racers of the dangers.

“People have been staging illegal street races and, tragically, getting into accidents ever since the automobile was first invented. It is not fair to blame us for human nature,” said a Universal spokesman.

The police remain unconvinced. “The number of illegal races surged when the first film came out, quietened down, and then we get a sudden rush when the second (film) arrives. Coincidence? I am not so sure,” a spokesman said.

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