Standing among the Pantheon of Unjustly Hated Cars, there is a special place for the Ford Pinto. Sure, Ralph Nader may have said the Chevy Corvair was “unsafe at any speed”, killing mid-engine American car design for at least two decades. And maybe the Dodge Neon was a bit boring and its paint was prone to peeling, but it was also dead-nuts reliable. But not one of those were accused of cooking trapped occupants alive after even relatively minor accidents.

Pinto fans are few and far between these days, and the name will likely never return to the Ford brand. But for those remaining Pinto loyalists, the compact car can make a mighty drag machine, just as this next video shows. Come along on a ride alongside a wheelstanding Pinto at the Thunder Valley Raceway in Marion, South Dakota. The Pinto’s builders never envisioned this for their affordable compact. We found a few more videos of this wheelstanding Pinto at their YouTube page.

There are few details regarding specifics of this wheelstanding Pinto driven by Cory Heckenlaible, though its not hard to imagine some kind of small-block V8 under the hood. It certainly doesn’t take a lot of power to left the front end of the featherweight Pinto, though to get the kind of distance demonstrated in this video takes a bit more than your average intake and exhaust upgrades.

Thanks to the increasing prevalence of GoPro cameras, we have the best seat in the house for watching this Pinto point its nose in the sky. Attached to the left-rear quarter panel, we get to watch a flawless wheelstand from start to finish. You couldn’t have asked for a better liftoff or landing, and this Pinto shows us how to do it right. Not bad for a car history remembers as a rolling time bomb.