Rocket-propelled grenades. Vehicle-born improvised explosive devices. Mortars by the bucketful. A Hydra 70 rocket going off at close proximity. One incident that involved a Hellfire missile and a building that was being used to store chemicals used to turn dump trucks into rolling bombs. Few things in life will scare me to the point where the fight-or-flight response doesn’t get overridden in a second flat. The above list certainly is worthy…it was a war zone when I went over, after all. But working for BangShift has added one more item to the list: the nitrous backfire.

There is just about nothing that you, as a photographer on the starting line, can really do when nitrous oxide, fuel, air and spark combine to turn what was a perfectly content race car into the loudest noise possible. I was shooting behind a shoebox Ford a couple of years back when it blew it’s hoodscoop into low Earth orbit. I was scrambling in a crab-walk position as far and as fast as I could manage before the flash had disappeared and the scoop reached apogee and started it’s descent towards the track. Once is more than enough, but there’s a lot of people on the bottle out there, and simple statistics say that there will be plenty of moments where one loud “pop” wakes up everyone within listening distance.

Take a lesson from this video, too: the importance of safety equipment, which we can never preach enough about; the need to know how the safety crew at the track you are running at operates, and towards the end of this video, the absolute worst way to deal with the resulting engine fire ever recorded and published…ever. Just be glad that you aren’t the one behind the wheel as you click on the play button.