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How To's and Info on Smokin the hell out of your ride!

Welcome to Smokin Burnouts

Welcome to Smokin Burnouts, Home of the never ending burnout movie and video gallery.

Like most of you we have pure gas running through our viens and love to watch tire shredding, raw horse power, nitrious filled burnouts.

That is why we created SmokinBurnouts.com. We got sick of searching the net for the best movies and videos of some of the hottest cars and trucks in the world doing some of the best burnouts.

Take a look at our extensive Library Classic & Muscle Car Burnouts

How to Do a Burnout

Burnouts with cars are where the wheels spin, often causing a large amount of smoke, but the car does not move until the driver "pops" the car into motion. Burnouts are also known as brake burns, roll-backs and wheel-spins, depending on the technique. Heat caused by the inability of the tires to gain traction with the road, and instead suffer extreme friction causes a lot of squealing, smoke and burnt rubber.

Burnouts began in drag racing where there was a real reason for them: Drag racing tires must be heated before a race and a burnout is the best way to accomplish this goal. Burnouts also help clean drag racing tires, which is where the two strips of rubber on the pavement come from. Today, burning out has become an art in itself and competitions are held worldwide.

Burning out a regular car is a whole other matter, and cannot be done well in any old car (especially four cylinders) as they typically do not have the power/weight and torque dynamics, and obviously have the wrong kind of tires. Doing a burnout on street tires makes a lot of smoke, removes layers of expensive rubber, and accomplishes nothing of dynamic significance besides enjoyment. It can be done though, and in this wikiHow we'll show you how.

Steps

Find out if you have a front wheel drive (FWD) or a rear wheel drive (RWD) car.
Check your hand brake, also known in slang as an E-brake, is functioning well.

Front Wheel Drive Cars

Put the car in first gear.
Hold in the clutch.
Rev. the engine.
Pull on the handbrake. Alternatively, you can skip this step.
Do not release the clutch.
Move the handbrake up and down to control the burnout.
To stop the burnout ease off the accelerator and free the brake.

Rear Wheel Drive Cars

Do a Basic RWD Burnout.
1. Lightly hold down the brake with your left foot.
2. Push the accelerator until the car moves forward a tiny bit.
3. At the same time floor the gas and press the brake harder.

Manual Rear Wheel Drive Cars

1. Depress the clutch, and rev the engine.
2. In one quick motion, "dump" the clutch and press the brake pedal while flooring the gas.

Use a line locker. A line locker is a device that modifies a car so the brake pedal only engages the front brakes. This dangerous and usually illegal device makes burnout on RWD cars easier and more dramatic. A line lock is a solenoid (fancy name for a switch) that gives you some extra buttons in the drivers seat to control your brakes. To do a burn out with a line locker installed:
1. Step on the brakes.
2. Push the line lock button.
3. Release the line lock button leaving your front brakes on and disengaging your back brakes, leaving those wheel free to spin, burn and make smoke.
4. Push line lock again to release the front brakes and move forward.
Do a donut. A doughnut (donut in the USA) is a circular burnout. To do a donut in RWD cars:
1. Find a large open area with no other cars, lampposts or other things you can hit. It is easy to lose control of a car with a donut.
2. Begin driving in slow circles.
3. Hit the gas hard so that the rear tires begin to lose traction.
4. You will burn around in a circle.

Rollbacks

A rollback is just like a burnout, but performed on a hill. They are a good way to get a burnout in an underpowered car as the backward movement helps with traction after the burn.
1. Find a hill.
2. Put the car in first.
3. Depress the clutch.
4. Let the car roll backwards down the hill.
5. Give the car plenty of gas.
6. Pop the clutch.

Peel-Out

A Peel-Out is when the driver spins the wheels on the road before moving. This is a lesser form of burnout, because the intention is not to cause excessive tire wear, but merely to spin the wheels and create a little squeal. Peel-Outs are far easier and less dangerous to your car than a burnout. To perform the Peel-Out:
1. Depress the clutch with the car in gear.
2. Rev the engine high while releasing the clutch.
3. Peeling-Out is often accomplished simply by flooring the gas pedal. This will not work in cars with small engines.

Other Burnout Techniques

Another burnout technique is aimed at cars with insufficient power to perform a burnout from a standing-still position. It involves putting the car into reverse, reversing at a higher speed than normal and then quickly putting the car into first gear and hitting the accelerator. A variant of this is to reverse at an angle which will result in two (for cars with limited slip differentials) distinctive skidmarks once the car pushes forward — in Arab parts of the world, this trick is called the "88", as the skidmarks resemble two number-eights in Arabic ("??"). In the United States these marks are referred to as "fishhooks", a very accurate description of the skidmarks as the car will leave a longer mark when the vehicle's velocity becomes aligned with its forward direction. During this stunt the vehicle always experiences a (not necessarily constant) acceleration vector pointing along the car's forward direction, but the velocity vector will reverse direction from initially pointing backwards to forward, leaving the "hook" mark.

At least as late as the 1970s in the United States, burnout enthusiasts would occassionally coat their (usually rear) drive wheel tires with a liquid chlorine-type bleach. This would result in spectacular clouds of white smoke during the burnout.

These and similar techniques are generally not recommended because they place a great load on drivetrain components and can result in transmission damage. The effective lifetime of the drive wheel tires is appropriately shortened.

An additional technique sometimes used by those celebrating a race victory (such as in NASCAR) is to position the racecar so that its nose is against the outside wall of the track, helping keep the car in place as the rear wheels spin.

Burnout Practice

Practice

Burnouts are quite easy to achieve in a front-wheel drive car; all one has to do is hold the parking brake (or "e-brakes") and accelerate. Note that once the car starts to move forward you must release the hand brake or it can and will eventually leave a flat spot on your rear two tires which will need to be replaced because the tires will now make your car excessively shake or vibrate, leading to tire failure. Since power is transferred to the front wheels only and the parking brake keeps the rear wheels still, the front wheels spin harshly against the surface while the car remains stationary, creating tire smoke. (Both front wheels may not spin if the car does not have a limited slip differential, however.)

Mercedes-Benz DTM car burnout

Burnouts in rear-wheel drive cars generally require more practice, the driver having to "feather" the brakes while keeping the accelerator ("gas") pedal pressed with the car in gear. At a certain point of balance, the front brakes will prevent the car from moving forward while the rear brakes will have insufficient grip to keep the wheels from spinning, since engine power is transferred to the rear wheels only.

It is possible to make rear-wheel drive burnouts easier by installing "line locks", devices which allow fluid pressure on the front brakes to be maintained while releasing the pedal to free the rear brakes. This is especially useful in a manual transmission vehicle, in which it can be quite difficult to manipulate the clutch, brake and gas pedals simultaneously. Line locks also reduce wear to the rear brakes, a common problem otherwise.

Burnouts are most difficult to perform in four-wheel drive cars, since all four wheels are given power and 4WDs generally have better initial traction (the engine weight being directly over the drive wheels). Additionally, it requires significantly more powerful engines to break all four tires loose at the same time, and the tires will spin for only a short while before all four gain traction.

History of Burnouts

The origins of burnouts can be traced to drag racing, where they have a practical purpose: drag racing tires perform better at higher temperatures, and a burnout is the quickest way to raise tire temperature immediately prior to a race. Drag race tracks sometimes use a specially-reserved wet-surface area known as the "burnout box" for this purpose.

Burnouts eventually became a serious form of competition and entertainment in their own right. Considerable prize money or goods are sometimes involved, and cars may even be sponsored or purpose-built specifically as "burnout cars". Burnout contests are judged on crowd response, with style and attitude therefore being important factors. Such contests are particularly popular in Australia but often occur in North America as well.

Burnouts are also common in informal street racing, usually for show value. As with all street racing activities, burnouts on public property are illegal in most countries but the severity of punishments vary. In New South Wales, for example, police have the power to confiscate the offending vehicle for 3 months for a first offense.

Burnouts are also occasionally performed by winning drivers at the end of NASCAR races to celebrate their victory.

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