Originally posted by DREDIOCK
Yes but you do the burnout to heat up the tires to make them sticky before the race actually happens no?
Once the race actually starts the last thing you want to be doing is running in place doing a burnout. correct?
Safe bet that off the track most people doing burnouts on the street is to look cool and they think the car is going fast that way..
the first car in the video is a classic example of what Im talking about.
Looks cool as hell but look how long it takes him to actually start going anywhere, and once he does how long it takes for him to get that car upto any kind of respectable speed
Ifanother car were next to him racing .
A car with less power but more traction could win that race.
What they were doing in the video was showing off, though. When I used to meet people a few miles' outside of town on a farm road on Sat. night's a decade + ago, We'd usually both do a quick burnout to(1.)Heat up the tires' and make them a little 'tackier', The same thing that Virgil's describing. (2.) Put a little bit of hot rubber down at the starting line, to give yourself something to launch off of, Since we weren't at Famoso, with 60 ft. of Concrete starting-line with generations' of rubber already there.(3.)It cleans' the dirt off, so you don't have anything compromising the 'footprint' of your tire. A real serious racer will do some kind of burnout, especially if he's pushing alotta power.
The pimple-faced, baseball-hat-on-sideways', Glued-on-wing-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-car, No-runnin', Not-enough-horsepower-to-be-the-starter-motor-on-a-small-block-chevy kid in a mid '90's civic will do a burnout, too. But only because they think that's some kind of social thing. They usually don't understand the science behind it(If they did, they would realize the futility of pitting a FWD 4-banger against a 350+cube Firebird, Camaro, Mustang, Charger, Plymouth Roadrunner, Chevelle, Fairlane, etc.)
Edit: There's a lot of cars' out there with enough power, that even with a decent burnout, have to 'soft pedal' off the line. It takes alot of experimentation to find the right launch RPM and amount of throttle with any given car. The best way is to go to a drag stip with a Friday-night grudge program, run your car through tech, and starting with your first pass, work on getting your 60-ft. time down as low as you can.
