Jet car goes up in flames!

That incident at Santa Pod comes only a few months after a racer got killed in South Africa on a jet car, and a TV presenter had a bad accident in UK with a similar vehicle, that almost costs him his life. Jet cars are to be taken very seriously.

 

Looks like he was blowing raw fuel out the back via some hacktastic "afterburner", which eventually ignited. It's not uncommon in jet cars to make a pseudo-afterburner by simply tapping a nozzle into the side of the exhaust housing and blowing fuel into the engine. If the engine is hot enough, the fuel will ignite, which looks cool, but it's not atomized properly and hence is usually a large fireball rather than the shock diamonds you'd see on a jet.

A proper afterburner has a series of atomizing injectors in a ring inside the engine housing. It doesn't look as "cool" in the jet car application as you can only correctly fire it at full throttle, which is tough to do when you want to make a fire show with the engine at idle, but it does prevent this sort of thing from happening.

 

That looks like one of the Fireforce cars, although its hard to tell being dark, I think they also had a crash over the finish line at an event last year