Why does a techno icon have his own drag racing series?
Carl Cox has been racing longer than most people have been clubbing. He made his first pass down a drag strip at Santa Pod Raceway in Bedfordshire at 19, years before he ever touched a pair of Technics. "Most people know me as a DJ and I've rocked the house for many, many years, but behind me has always been cars, bikes, racing," he told Auto Express in 2020. "It was just a hobby at one point, but the hobby's started taking over my life a little bit."
That hobby now has a name: FIVE90, Carl Cox Motorsport's own Pro Mod drag racing championship. Its inaugural season just wrapped its finale on 9 and 10 September, at the same track where Cox made that first pass as a teenager.
Update: Cox took the win. After two days of racing at Santa Pod, he claimed the overall victory in that round of the FIVE90 Pro Mod Series, topping a field of seven Pro Mods all chasing the same 5.90 pass. Round 2, as Carl Cox Motorsport put it, is officially in the books.
What is FIVE90, and how does the 5.90 index actually work?
FIVE90 runs on a strict 5.90-second index: the goal isn't to go as fast as possible, it's to run as close to exactly 5.90 seconds as you can without going under. It borrows an Aussie Format bracket structure that rewards consistency across a weekend over one heroic pass. Cox designed the three-round calendar himself: Round 1 in May, Round 2 in July, and the Season Finale in September, all at Santa Pod, each built around qualifying runs, head-to-head races and a top-eight shootout.
There's no entry fee, a rarity in a sport where a single Pro Mod pass can cost thousands in fuel and parts. Instead, Cox put up £20,000 in prize money per round plus a £30,000 end-of-series fund split among every driver who completes all three rounds, open to any Pro Mod or Top Doorslammer, no invitation required.
Cox races his own car in the field: the "Coxy Cuda," a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda Pro Mod built for a 5.85 index, capable of running past 250mph in under six seconds off roughly 3,500 horsepower. Heading into the September finale, he topped his own points table with 299, 31 clear of Swiss veteran Bruno Bader on 268, with Andy Robinson, Kev Slyfield and John Webster all within striking distance.
"I think I'm going to end up with the title of the world's fastest DJ."
Is this just a side hobby, or something bigger?
FIVE90 isn't Cox's only motorsport project. Carl Cox Motorsport also backs the Carl Cox Motorsport Cup, a grassroots circuit-racing series in New Zealand that has run for 14 years, plus riders competing in the WCR women's championship and a sidecar racing team. Cox has been open about what the habit cost him early on: "Drag racing costs money and I was spending most of what I was making in the building trade on my music... Music or racing? I couldn't do both so one of them had to go," he told Drag News Magazine in 2017. Music won. Decades later, with that career made, he's putting the money back the other way, into the sport he once had to give up for the decks.
