The Johnson’s Show Us How Pro Stock Teams Break In New Slicks

The only thing drag racers like more than a brand new set of slicks with a fresh sticker on them is a set of lightly scuffed brand new tires, and for Pro Stock racers, who spend untold thousands of man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain fractions of a second on the race track, not a single stone can be left unturned — especially the tires.

For this reason, Pro Stock teams have long been known to possess “burnout cars” specifically for the purpose of breaking in new slicks before they load them on the trailer for competition use. Some teams will simply use the primary car and do a succession of burnouts on several sets of tires during a test session, but for those with the means, a dedicated tire scuffing car and a burnout pad behind the shop are all a part of the program of winning races and championships, and no one knows what it takes to accomplish that more than “The Professor” Warren Johnson, and his son Kurt.

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While the Johnson’s have been racing a limited schedule over the last couple of seasons, they’re still working hard to advance their program for when they DO hit the track, and one of those outings will come at this weekend’s NHRA Southern Nationals at their home track in Commerce, Georgia, and this week, Warren, Kurt, and the crew were outside the shop breaking in tires for the weekend ahead with their very unique and quite rudimentary “burnout car”.

The Johnson’s “burnout car” is, as far as we can tell, an old Pro Stock chassis that’s been cobbled together with all sorts of random parts, including some donut wheels on the front, an old square-style hood scoop off one of Johnson’s old race cars, and a roof that doesn’t look like the shape of any Pro Stock body we’ve seen recently. But aside from gearing that keeps the RPM’s low (presumably so it will live through years and years of burnouts without hanging a rod out of the block), this contraption actually sounds quite potent. Whether the car is safe at speed or not is doubtful, but we’re thinking Warren’s “burnout car” could turn a number if they took it to a race track.