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Sweet balls of fire! Watch a Lamborghini Gallardo explode into flames at 207 mph

Sometimes you have a bad day. And sometimes your tuned 1,800 horsepower supercar catches fire at 200 plus mph. That day is both awesome (for onlookers) and catastrophic (for you).

This fantastic video shows one of the things that can happen when you tune a car to extremes, particularly when that car is made by the Italian auto industry. At least it wasn’t made by British Leyland; there probably would have been electrocution to go with the burns.

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The video shows a race between two tuned Lamborghini Gallardos. The star of the show is an appropriately flame orange car developed by Underground Racing. Everything is going well when, something – probably a turbo – producing a bright orange ball of flames. For a few moments it looks like the car is literally trying to outrun its own explosion.

Fortunately for everyone, the tuners were smart enough to install a fire suppression system which meant that instead of the car blowing up at 200 mph the fire was out within seconds. Thankfully, this means that the people involved can live on to tune again, after having hopefully learned a few things about forced induction … and how much cooling it requires.

Regardless, the driver of that Gallardo can now say something that very few alive people with all of their skin can say: that they have driven 207 mph in a car that was on fire. 

Peter Braun
Peter is a freelance contributor to Digital Trends and almost a lawyer. He has loved thinking, writing and talking about cars…
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