No chains, no wall, no water: a real burnout without restraints.

For decades, the burnout was one of the highlights of musclecars and hot rods everywhere. At car shows, burnout contests award the driver who put the most smoke into the air from his rear tires. At dragstrips, burnouts are the spectacular precursor to the sprint down the 1320. Even NASCAR has made the burnout at the end of the race part of the victory celebration, much to the delight and approval of the spectators.

With all due respect, the front-wheel-drive infestation hit and at first it was a disappointment. But it didn’t stop people from building horsepower and, subsequently, providing onlookers with a smokey burnout – even if it was from the wrong end of the car. At some car shows, you should see the coaxing from the sidelines to get some small, import tuner to smoke the front fenders as they cheer him on. It’s probably always going to be one of the coolest things about our love for the automobile, and we probably won’t ever get tired of seeing the burnout.

While we do want to give props to the front-drivers that can still smoke the wheel wells, the burnout contests of late aren’t exactly like the burnouts from the 70’s. You see, too often now we see the stage being set so that you almost can’t fail at doing a burnout.

There’s a water hose close by to make the pavement slick, there are wheel chocks to keep the car from rolling out, and in some cases, like in the video above, there is a chain that restrains the vehicle to a wall so that it has no choice but to do a burnout. Granted, sometimes we see small, skinny meats on a musclecar to facilitate the burnout, but usually that because wheels and tires aren’t cheap, so it’s a reasonable trade off.

But all of these restraints and tricks take away from the whole purpose of the burnout, a show of horsepower. So we found it kind of interesting that this Honda Civic used all of the above tricks to perform the smokey burnout. But sadly, as the saying goes, where there’s smoke – there’s fire, and this Civic shows just what happens when you overcook your rice. The owner rushes to safety and the onlookers have no idea what to do except pour perfectly good beer on the tires.