The title of this video is “Don’t Play With Nitro!” and frankly there has never been more sage advice given by anyone over the years. Here you are going to see some of the craziest stuff that has happened over the years with nitro fueled race cars. Now this is certainly not a complete list because on a damned near weekly basis there’s another situation where someone learns a lesson about nitromethane. Sometimes those lessons are more positive than others.

So the notable moments in this one are certainly Kenny Bernstein running over his crew and the infamous Scott Weiss top fuel explosion behind the starting line at the US Nationals. That moment is what we captured for the lead photo of this blog item. When the team went to turn the engine over as they all do before they attempt to start the car there was nitro in one of the cylinders. That nitro combined with the pressure exerted on it by the rising piston and the latent heat left in the engine from warming it up caused the thing to explode. The violence of the explosion is even worse than it normally is on the track because of the fact that the valves are closed instead of one being hung open so the basically blows the head off the block and sends stuff flying. You’ll see that a crewman got dinged up by flying debris in this one. Bad deal.

There’s actually two of those style incidents in this video. You’ll see a young Jim Oberhoffer talking to Dave Reiff about their car spitting the bit at Reading when they went to start it years ago.

Nitro is awesome but boy it can reach up and bite you when you never see it coming.

Press play below to see this video filled with nitro fueled mishaps over the years –