If you’re a regular Carscoops reader, or spend any time at all looking at car videos on YouTube, you’ll have come across a CarWow drag race. The CarWow channel is a monster, boasting over five million subscribers and a back catalogue of hundreds of head-to-heads that grows with the addition of new races every week.

People have been pitting cars against each other on a straight bit of road almost as long as there have been cars, so CarWow can hardly claim to have invented that. And it wasn’t the first channel to upload drag races to YouTube. But through its relentless content push, CarWow and presenter/content boss, Mat Watson, have created a winning format that other channels have been forced to copy.

It’s like the Wikipedia of automotive head-to-heads. Think of any combination of cars available in Europe (and even a few big-rigs) sold in the last few years, and more than likely CarWow has sent them down a quarter mile, including the Rimac Nevera and Ferrari SF90, whose race has been watched 4.3 million times in two weeks. Or its most recent headline-grabber, which matched a Bugatti Chiron against a Red Bull Formula 1 car, and even roped ex-F1 racer David Coulthard in to help out with the driving.

Related: This Year’s “World’s Greatest Drag Race” Features More Than 5,000 HP

Skip The Filler, Which Is Fastest?

The videos, hosted by affable everyman, Mat Watson, tap into the primal desire innate in every one of us to know whether car A is faster than car B, rather than sit through 20 minutes of beautifully shot but vacuous promotional footage. A desire to know whether, if you blew $75k on an Audi RS5, you’d regret it when a BMW M4 or AMG C63 pulled alongside and you both dropped the hammers. Or a desire to know stuff you never even thought to ask, like whether a Ferrari 308 with a Tesla powertrain is faster than an original Testarossa.

“Not Everyone Can Drive Like Chris Harris, But Anyone Can Mash A Throttle”

Old Media Were Slow To Respond

“I think in many ways the traditional print and digital media were caught napping by YouTube, partly because they struggled to monetize it” says Watson, who himself worked in that environment before being lured to startup CarWow in 2016.

“They’ll overcomplicate things by trying too hard, or going to a track, which looks spectacular, but not everyone who watches these videos can drive like Chris Harris, sliding supercars around,” Watson says. “But anyone can mash a throttle wide open, so the people watching our videos can really imagine being in the car.”

Judging by CarWow’s ritual pre-race tire-warmup routine, which is mostly just an excuse to mess about going sideways before getting down to the business of going straight, Watson is reasonably handy in a car, though by his own admission, that wasn’t always the case.

“There are some people who are just gifted drivers, and some people who will always be terrible drivers no matter how hard they try,” Watson says. “But there are millions of people out there who are just in the middle. They’ve got the potential to be pretty good, if they had the chance to spend more time trying. And that was me. In my old magazine job I was never on the road test desk so I didn’t get much chance to drive. And now I do.”

I should add that when we spoke he was on his way to a track day with a Porsche 911 and a Toyota GR Yaris to brush up on those skills. On CarWow’s dime, of course.

What The Hell Is Carwow, Anyway?

CarWow earns a few of those dimes from its YouTube channel, but really that’s just a giant shop window. Its real business, which takes place in the UK, Germany and Spain, is helping people find their next new car. If it’s successful in finding you yours, it gets paid by the manufacturer.

But if CarWow’s business is all about trying to hook you up with a new Honda CR-V, isn’t there a huge disconnect between that and a video where a Lamborghini Aventador SV faces off against a 580 hp Citroen Rallycross car?

“There is,” laughs Watson, “but we actually do more straightforward reviews than drag races. And the people who watch our videos are often the ‘influencers’ in their social circle. They’re the people their friends ask for advice when they need to buy a car, so if the CarWow name has stuck in their heads because they’ve seen a drag race, and they pass that name on to their friends, that’s good for us.”

And plenty of people have seen those drag races. Watson says if a video gets 1 million views in the first day, it’s considered a hit. But is he worried that the drag racing format will get stale? “Yeah, it might, eventually,” he concedes. “But I think there’s still plenty of fun to be had yet.”