Today we would like to increase your drifting knowledge and teach you more about burnouts, drifts and that lovely white smoke.

When a person who is passionate about engine power and adrenaline pulls a huge loud burnout or an epic drift session, they are not actually creating thick ‘smoke’ behind your car, but burning rubber.

Just think about this interesting question: if we set a tire on fire, it will produce thick black smoke, so why do the tires on your car create white smoke during the burnout?

Well, the answer to this question is actually quite simple: when one drifts his car or does a wild burnout, he is actually making any ‘smoke’.

What happens when the tire is spinning is that the friction between it and the tarmac superheats the rubber up 400 degrees Fahrenheit (although this depends of course on how long the burnout lasts). This process on the other hand melts down the rubber tread, causing the chemicals and oil within it to vaporize and sending those molecules up into the air. Then the vaporized molecules cool down quickly and condense in the air, and thus they become what we see as white ‘smoke’-, although it is actually more like steam than smoke.