A Christchurch cul-de-sac has thwarted its boy-racer problem with secret video surveillance.

Business owners and the only resident of Dalziel Place in Woolston were fed up with weekly crowds of boy racers converging on their street, doing burnouts, defacing properties and throwing bottles.

Cameras set up by a surveillance company that has its headquarters on the street captured footage of six cars and their drivers breaking the law.

The footage was passed on to police and all six drivers last week had their cars impounded for 28 days.

Graham Scott, who owns the Retail & Industrial Surveillance Co (Risc) which carried out the covert filming, said the cameras were difficult to set up but had an immediate effect.

"Since we started this thing, and the police have got at it, there's been bugger all (boy racers) back. There's none of these guys coming back at night now."

The only resident of the street, Peter Rigg, who also runs his business from his home, said he had battled the problem for three years.

Groups of six to 10 cars came two or three times a week and did "massive spin-outs" at the end of the cul-de-sac.

"Then they would do this drifting where they would drive down the street at massive speed and drift the car," Rigg said.

The scariest occasion was when a car drifted between a makeshift grandstand - with 10 people sitting all over the top of a parked car - and a power pole. The drifting car spun around backwards and ended up in the middle of the road with two tyres on fire, Rigg said.

"How they missed the power pole, God only knows - there would have been a whole lot of them killed," he said.

"The fact is that they throw their vodka and bourbon bottles all over the place - they're vandals. They're not nice people when they're in a crowd."

Another business owner, Mel Sanders, said Scott's cameras had "done (them) all a favour - it's a win-win for all". Sanders was worried the boy racers would move on to somewhere else, however.

Senior Constable Peter Hansen said police were happy to act on the footage.

"It was a bit of shock (to the drivers) when we came around to talk to them," he said.

Police had limited resources so were happy for private individuals and companies to make their own footage of boy racers misbehaving.