Sandown Raceway in Australia is one heck of a place. The racing circuit is built around the outside of a horse racing track and hosts one of the big three endurance races on the Virgin Supercars Series’ calendar, the Sandown 500. It’s full of tricky corners with changing road cambers and hard turns that are also braking zones, but the main straight, which actually bends, is long and allows big-time top speed. For this track day driver, that meant stretching the legs on his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 6.5, which for the nerds in the crows is basically an Evo VI Tommi Mäkinenn Edition (TME). What the Evo driver didn’t count on, however, was his engine spitting out its internals at the top of fifth gear near the end of the long straight.
While winding out the car on the straight and pushing 180 kph, there’s a visible lick of flame from the hood scoop and a sound like Finnish rally driver Mäkinen ripping over a gravel rally stage. Except there’s no gravel, just the sound of engine parts bouncing off Sandown’s racing surface and peppering the bottom of the car. It’s a horrible sound and the driver pulls the car calmly to a halt off the racing surface—no small feat as there was almost certainly some amount of oil on the rear tires from the vented engine block—and grabs his fire extinguisher to put out the flames. The fire extinguished itself, however, and photos of the engine block post-mortem look awfully painful with a half-dozen punctures in the turbocharged 4G63.
However, in an update just a few weeks after the engine failure, the driver reported that his Evo TME had a new engine and was back on the road. Still, it’s rough to see anybody lose a track car for any length of time (or amount of money) in such a way. Oof. The whole video is worth watching just to see Sandown, but the pain starts around 5:30 in the video:
That sound… the sound of money going away..