WORLD’S biggest, world’s best, and world’s most awesome – they’re all terms that are well and truly overused these days, but we also reckon it’s a fair call when describing Justen Brown’s burnout fire at the 2013 Mallanats at the World’s Biggest Burnout Fire.

Burnout fires are something that we’ve come to expect as part of the scene in recent years, especially when the ambient temperature starts to climb. When the mercury starts to climb north of 35 degrees Celsius, so do the number of burnout fires. It was pretty warm at Mallanats during burnout qualifying.

Justen Brown and his blown Chevy small-block powered VG Commodore ute were giving the Mallala pad a thorough spanking when the rear end erupted into flames. Instead of backing out of it, Justen elected to even harder and the paint on the rear quarters started to burn. As he flicked the car around the pad the fire got worse and threatened the fuel cell in the back of the ute, but it wasn’t until the flames started to find their way into the cabin that Justen pulled up and jumped out.

The rear end was totally torched, but Justen wasn’t perturbed at all. In fact he did it all again in the finals. When the video hit the internet shortly after, it reignited the argument for race suits in burnout cars; not hard to work out why.

Since then Justen has repainted the Commodore several times. First he went with the same shade of orange but more recently the ute has been covered in turquoise – maybe it makes the flames stand out better?