For years we’ve shown you the wild side of what an Australian auto event can be. The powerskids that leave Holdens looking like a horizontally-launched Space Shuttle as they rocket down the asphalt with the rear tire ablaze. Burnout contest that are so monstrous they leave the fans closest to the pit coated in rubber dust. “Cruising” that looks more like a free-for-all than anything else. The Aussies love to have a good time with their cars, but in some cases…especially where the burnout contests are concerned…if you haven’t lived it and/or aren’t familiar with the scene, you probably find yourself wondering if that’s the way that it’s always been.
That Aussies actually take their cars out and go play, that’s no shock. This is the country that brought you the Supercar Scare and anti-hoon laws…those don’t come about for no reason. Aussies have no trouble exercising their heavy hitting muscle cars. But this footage from the later 1980s shows Summernats in a different light: there’s a start-stop challenge (a “go-to-whoa”) and a burnout competition that barely looks like the wild snake pit you see today. And the cars…Slot mags, stinkbug stances, and just wait until you get a load of the wrecker!
Correction, that was a Canberra street machine club show held a couple of months before the Summer Nats. Iirc the burnout strip where this was filmed was installed in 1989. Pretty much all the cars featured were local cars, most of them I saw pretty much daily as I live in Canberra.
The tow truck doing a burnout later became a tri-drive roll back, and is apparently rusting away not far from me. Owner reckons he’ll never sell it.
Oh yeah, before they put the burnout strip in they used to hold the burnout comp on the main internal road of EPIC, then known as NATEX. There is some pretty crazy footage from the earlier events on youtube.
Which is no where near as crazy as the stuff that happend on the streets around the complex. I still remember a guy doing a huge burnout, and donuts, in the middle of an intersection in the Belconnen town center, in the rain. Crazy times.