Like them or not, victory burnouts have become part of NASCAR

By TONY FABRIZIO
Media General News Service
Published: May 17, 2008

CONCORD, N.C. — Fans and young drivers think they are cool. Some of the old-school drivers think they are too hard on equipment and obnoxious.
Like them or not, victory burnouts in NASCAR have become so commonplace that there’s now a contest to see who can do the best one.
It will take place before Saturday night’s Sprint All-Star Race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Baseball has a home run derby and basketball has a slam dunk contest. Now, NASCAR’s all-star event has its own short-attention-span, explosive sideshow.
Mark Martin won’t be one of those participating.
“I think they’re real juvenile,” the conservative 49-year-old veteran said. “If I did a burnout, I would wreck. So I’m not going to do it.”
Burnouts — the driver revs his engine, spins his rear tires and fills the air with smoke — are not the only way drivers celebrate wins in NASCAR. Tony Stewart hoists his considerable heft in a Spiderman fence climb. Carl Edwards climbs out after 500 miles and does a back flip. But burnouts have become so common that when a driver doesn’t do one he gets booed.
Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Greg Biffle and Clint Bowyer will compete in Saturday’s contest. They’ll drive Richard Petty Driving Experience cars, do a burnout, two donuts and pull into a tight “Victory Lane.” They’ll be judged on time and style points, with the winner getting $10,000 for charity.
Bowyer may need some work. A two-time winner in the Sprint Cup Series, he hit the wall during burnout practice.
“We were supposed to be practicing burnouts, not crashing,” Harvick cracked.
Three-time truck series champion Jack Sprague wasn’t invited to the contest. That’s too bad, because in September 2001 at Richmond, Sprague performed what’s considered the greatest burnout in history.
He generated so much heat in his rear tires that they caught on fire.
“That was just dumb luck — they had just sealed the racetrack,” Sprague said this week. “I was doing a really cool burnout and the tires caught the sealer on fire. That swung all the sealer up under the truck and caught the whole back of the truck on fire. It melted the Bondo off the quarter-panels, melted the paint off the rear end and the chassis underneath the truck.”

AVOIDING THE DAMAGE
Two-time defending Sprint Cup champion Johnson, whose 33 victories have allowed him plenty of burnout practice, has tried to replicate Sprague’s act.
But he has blown his tires out, “and then as you bring the car to Victory Lane, NASCAR is looking at you like, ‘Why are you blowing the tires,?’ because it does damage to the car,” Johnson said. “And I feel bad for my crew guys, because as those tires come apart it rips the body apart and everything underneath it apart.”
NASCAR vice president and historian Jim Hunter recalls that drivers have celebrated victories in a variety of ways through the decades. He remembered that after one of his seven Daytona 500 victories, Richard Petty picked up his entire crew and drove them around the track on top of his car.
Hunter said NASCAR doesn’t frown upon burnouts, even though it’s conceivable damage to the engine or quarter-panels could mask cheating.
“I don’t think they would be able to do something to where we couldn’t tell it was done in a burnout,” Hunter said.
Burnouts are used in drag racing to heat the tires before a run. As a way of celebrating a victory in other forms of racing, Alex Zanardi started doing them in CART in the mid-1990s. The flashy Italian made them a work of art, creating stylish swirls of melted rubber with his Champ Car.

NOT ALL ARE FANS
Ron Hornaday Jr., who has done much of his racing in the truck series, is credited with bringing them to NASCAR. He had to stop for a while because his boss at the time, Dale Earnhardt Sr., banned them.
“A couple of the guys in the shop said, ‘Well, what if he still does one?’” Hornaday said. “Dale said, ‘Well, I’ll fine him and take it out of his check.’ The guys said they would pay the fine, and Dale said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what: If he does another burnout, he’s fired.’”
Terry Labonte and Rusty Wallace didn’t like them, either.
When Labonte won the final Labor Day running of the storied Southern 500 at Darlington in 2003, he picked up the checkered flag and, classically, slowly paraded it around the track.
“I’m too old to do doughnuts,” Labonte said afterward. “I think it’s goofy looking.”
Wallace stuck to the “Polish Victory Lap” — a reverse lap honoring the late 1992 champion Alan Kulwicki — during the latter days of his career. Reflecting the generational gap on the issue, Wallace’s son, Steven, likes burnouts.
Critics say the burnouts put undue stress on the engines, drive shaft, gears and axles and can, as Johnson pointed out, cause sheet metal damage if the tire shreds. Sprague points out that most of those things are rebuilt after each race anyway.
“I see some guys saying it’s childish, and then a month later they’re doing one,” Sprague said.
Martin won’t convert.
“I’ll just collect the hardware,” he said. “I’d rather take the checkered flag and hurry on in to Victory Lane and get there so I can start enjoying it.”