One of the best thing about the current musclecar wars is that we’re seeing people excited about musclecars again. Although the first time around we only saw horsepower figures in the 300-400 range, now we’re seeing factory cars with over 700 horsepower, and tuned cars up to 1,000 and more.
In the 1970s, most people wouldn’t dream of driving a 700 horsepower car in regular traffic [1] – let alone every single day. But now we have such advanced systems that it’s nothing special to see a 500+ horsepower car on the road on our way to work.
[2]Our friend Todd took his Hellcat to a burnout contest. He made a little smoke, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Add all this horsepower to a modern musclecar, and you also increase the cars ability to paint gooey 11s on the road, and sometimes those 11’s come with a little too much heat [3] and we get some of that magic called fire.
In the video above, we see a rather lengthy burnout from an apparent Hellcat owner in Poland. Above and beyond the incredibly long patches that were laid down during his run, there was something else that was pretty amazing at the same time: he managed to get to 7th gear while spinning his tires.
[4]
[5]
[6]
Clearly, the Hellcat in the video has the 8-speed automatic, and having more gears means the car can stay in the powerband a little more while transitioning to the next gear. But you have to admit: a seventh gear burnout in a 4,400 lb car is pretty impressive. It can also be rather costly, because those tires are not cheap.