Engine Failure: Nova Goes Supernova
Engine scatters its guts all over the drag strip and video captures the epic rod-puking in high-definition!
When a star explodes, astronomers call it a supernova. The space agency NASA calls a supernova “the largest explosion that takes place in space.” The phenomenon can change entire portions of the night sky for years. And so it seems fitting that this catastrophically failing drag-racing engine came from a Chevy Nova.
Let’s call it a Nova Supernova. And you sure don’t need a telescope to see it.
Urban Hillbilly Videos caught the whole engine carnage as it was happening. You can actually see the engine parts fleeing for horrible freedom through the haze of suddenly free oil. If you have kids watching, cover their eyes, because this is like a V8 murder in real time.
If you listen carefully once the engine has properly pooped all over the drag-strip groove, you can hear engine parts clattering around still. We will hazard a guess that the track crew enjoyed less excitement. That’s a long way down the track and into the shutoff area with a trail of broken parts and evacuated oil.
The video, however, is like an engine snuff film. It’s pretty rare to get such a good view of an engine’s bottom end splitting like a fault line. If we knew it wasn’t ruining someone’s day, we’d probably be really excited about it.
All in all, this serves as a few friendly reminders.
- Always double-check your work when putting together an engine. We don’t know if anything was done wrong or even if the car owner put together the engine. However, if you do, take your time building it.
- Sometimes, an engine is just ready to blow up. Parts fail. It’s a fact of car ownership, especially when you run it hard.
- When something blows up at the track, pull off to the side as safe as possible.