Now This Is A Burnout!

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of burnouts, well, unless you’re warming up your tires in preparation for a 1/4 mile run on a dragstrip. Sure, it’s nice to spin your tires once and a while, just to reassure yourself that the car has enough power to break the driving wheels loose if you need to do it, but just spinning your wheels to make big plumes of smokes seems to me to be, well, just spinning your wheels. I’m no fan of drifting, but at least all the wheelslip in drifting competitions has a point. It’s one thing if the smoky burnouts are in celebration of a race win, though to be honest, those got old a long time ago, about as spontaneous as Vettel or Schumacher spraying champagne after a F1 win from pole to pole, but turning your tires into rubber smoke while going nowhere just strikes me as pointless and wasteful.

Burnouts are also not without risk. Tires can catch fire, or explode, damaging bodywork or mechanical components. Actually, the owner of this Corvette with what appears to be a supercharger sticking through the hood probably wished his tires had caught fire and exploded, instead of his car catching fire and exploding while doing a burnout at a 2010 car show. From where the fire seems to have started, it’s possible that an overheated transmission or leaking transmission fluid was the cause. Whatever the cause, something keeps feeding the flames, the fuel pump, transmission fluid or engine oil. Of course, once the conflagration spread far enough, all three of those fluids, along with the Corvette’s plastic body panels, were involved.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS