History Tell me about your first, most memorable burnout or the best burnout you witnessed.

I was maybe 18 and the ticket said “Accelerating in such a way as to cause the rear tires to loose traction.”

The judge asked “What do you have in that thing?”

“327, 4speed, Holley 600 on a Edelbrock Torquer II, Headman full length headers, blah blah-blah-blah. I just put it all together sir, and I didn’t realize how powerful it was.”

That didn’t work and the judge blew my food budget for the month. Lots of Ramen…. I later faced the same judge for “Willfully and Negligently riding my bicycle upon the sidewalk”. That time it only cost $10.


The best one I ever saw? I was at a car show in Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF and there was a narrow road full of passer bys going both directions bumper to bumper nearby. Someone would burn out and these two park cops in a topless jeep would pull them over and write them up. This had been going on for a while when a gnarly looking old biker dude on a purple chopper starts roasting his tire 20’ away from the cops while giving them the finger. They can’t get to him because traffic was stalled so they hop out of their Jeep headed his way. He split lanes and left them standing there. It was memorable.

 

I was one of those rare high school hot rodders who believed that showing restraint was cool.

So imagine my frustration when one night I got a reckless driving ticket for a burn out I never did; A friend of mine in a very similar looking car ahead of me had done the deed. By the time I passed slowly through his smoke cloud, a cop decided it must’ve been me.

Even after my friend circled back and confessed to the cop, I still got the ticket.

The cop was too embarrassed to admit he had made a mistake, so he wrote me the ticket for the one thing he could get me for; doing 30mph in a 25mph school zone. At 2:00 o’clock in the morning.

Yes, I got a reckless driving ticket for that.

And that was the most memorable burnout I ever saw.

 

Wow
That is something else!


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just some dumb kid doing a burnout for the sake of making smoke...stupid idiot kid... he will probably never amount to anything in the hot rod world.

 

another nobody doing a burnout for no apparent reason... clearly the hot rod world would be better off without this kind of tomfoolery

 

I even had three passengers in my car that night telling the cop how wrong he'd got it. He told them to shut up, and when I continued to speak in my defense he threatened to arrest me.

I seethed over this incident for years, and it became the source for most of my anti-cop feelings.

The cop was also our high school law enforcement educational officer. I gave him dirty looks and a few pointed comments in halls during the months after this incident.

In my high school years I got profiled in my car so bad, I eventually lost my license for tiny BS infractions and was thrown off my mom's insurance policy, and even had my plates revoked. When I had to go to driver education class to get my driver's license and plates back, I protested the injustice by driving my car to every class anyway without plates. I painted a skull and crossbones on a blank plate and bolted that up in place. Ironically, I never got caught for any of that!