Admittedly there’s those days where things just don’t go the way you had hoped for, but as the old saying goes, a bad day racing is better than a good day at work, right? Well, perhaps not the case for this GTO racer. After getting a freshly built TH-400 bolted up, this owner was ready to post some new times up on the scoreboard at Englishtown during Saturday’s test session.

Needless to say by his friend’s post on Yellowbullet, things didn’t go as planned when leaving the line.

A rather unorthodox transmission air cooling mod...

Once the car took off, the transmission was literally blown to smithereens and engulfed the side of the car in flames. Thank goodness for the SFI protective housing that surrounds the transmission, or this small incident could have really turned into a much more catastrophic disaster. Luckily the driver was ok as the flames died down quickly after cutting the car off. Going with the comedic “That’ll buff out” phrase, the black soot from the flames all over the door panels literally did wipe right off, which gave the guys a chuckle.

The transmission has been pulled and diagnosed, and hopefully the folks that put it together will be able to determine what the particular problem was that caused this. While you can’t see from the camera angle, the car does have a chute out back as it has already hustled down the 1320 in a  stout 9.11 at 152+ mph – short of any future problems the next time she rolls out on the 1320, this sleek Pontiac should best that personal best by a fair bit. We don’t know a whole lot about the motor combination, but we do know that East Coast Supercharging has one of their blower’s setup atop an LSx under there. While this was certainly one heck of an interesting, and eye-catching explosion, have you got any starting line stories that you think top this one? Feel free to let us know about it in the comments!