You Don’t Need a Manual to Smoke the Tires — Inside the Automatic Muscle Car Burnout Everyone Gets Wrong

Creator Sick McVick films an entire burnout tutorial from the passenger seat, breaking down exactly how to smoke the tires in a 1970s automatic muscle car — a technique manual-only guides never cover. The car itself has drawn comparisons to the black Nova from Tarantino’s Death Proof, with multiple commenters independently spotting the resemblance. Beyond the driving lesson, the video’s loose, high-energy style has viewers comparing the host to a mashup of two well-known comedic actors. The result is equal parts instructional content and pure car-culture entertainment.

Somewhere between a driving lesson and a stunt reel, one YouTuber decided the best way to teach an automatic-transmission burnout was to just climb into the passenger seat and film the whole thing raw. The car doing the smoking looks disturbingly familiar to genre movie fans — more than one commenter immediately clocked it as a dead ringer for a certain black Nova from a Quentin Tarantino thriller, though nobody in the video ever confirms the connection outright. The host’s own on-camera energy has viewers comparing him to two completely different Hollywood comedians at once. But underneath the jokes is a genuinely useful technique most manual-only tutorials never bother explaining: how do you actually smoke the tires when there’s no clutch to work with?

Meet Sick McVick, the Host Behind This Burnout Tutorial

This video comes from creator Sick McVick, who runs the “How to do a Burnout in an Automatic 70’s Muscle Car” tutorial as part of a broader catalog of car-culture content built around riding shotgun during real driving demonstrations. Rather than narrating from outside the car, McVick films the entire sequence from the passenger seat, giving viewers a first-person view of the pedal work, steering corrections, and tire smoke that a purely external shot would miss. The channel frames the video explicitly as “a driving school for those who seek automotive adrenaline,” positioning it as instructional content rather than pure stunt footage.

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The Muscle Car Viewers Keep Comparing to a Movie Icon

More than one commenter zeroed in on the car itself, nicknaming it the “death proof Nova” in reference to the black Chevy Nova driven by Kurt Russell’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film Death Proof. The resemblance is strong enough that multiple separate commenters made the connection independently, joking about the car’s “horror movie” presence on screen. Whether or not the resemblance was intentional, the comparison speaks to how deeply that particular Nova has embedded itself in muscle car culture nearly two decades after the film’s release.

The Automatic Burnout Technique the Video Actually Teaches

The core instructional content boils down to a specific two-foot braking technique: left foot planted hard on the brake pedal to hold the car in place, right foot burying the throttle, then bleeding a little pressure off the brake right as the revs come up so the rear tires break loose without the car lurching forward. There’s no line lock in a stock 1970s muscle car splitting the front and rear circuits for you, so it all comes down to pedal feel. One commenter who tried a similar approach elaborated in the replies, suggesting that easing off the pedal “a tiny bit” after nailing the accelerator is the key difference between a clean smoky burnout and one that just stalls the car or leaves tread marks nobody’s impressed by.

Why Automatic Burnouts Are Harder to Teach Than Manual Ones

Manual-transmission burnout tutorials dominate car content because the technique is more intuitive — clutch control naturally manages how much power reaches the wheels. Automatic transmissions remove that lever entirely, forcing drivers to rely purely on brake and throttle modulation to achieve the same result, which is exactly the gap this video is built to fill. That’s part of why the tutorial resonates specifically with owners of 1970s muscle cars, many of which came exclusively or predominantly with automatic transmissions from the factory, leaving owners without a manual-specific guide to lean on.

The Reach-Through Door Trick That Got Its Own Applause

One small detail drew outsized praise in the comments: at one point in the video, McVick opens the car door from the inside by reaching through the open window from outside, a move one viewer specifically called out and described as earning “the applause.” It’s a minor showmanship touch, but it fits the video’s overall tone — treating car culture not just as mechanical instruction but as a bit of a performance, something meant to be entertaining even when the core content is genuinely educational.

How Viewers Describe the Host’s On-Camera Energy

Commenters repeatedly zeroed in on McVick’s personality as much as the driving itself, with one describing his look mid-burnout as an “uncanny cross between Jack Black and Sean William Scott.” Others called the video “the best I’ve ever seen on YouTube” and praised the infectious enthusiasm on display, suggesting the channel’s appeal rests as much on its host’s charisma as on the technical driving content — a combination that’s helped clips like this one circulate well beyond a dedicated car-enthusiast audience.

Why Burnout Culture Still Resonates With Muscle Car Fans

Burnouts occupy a strange place in car culture — technically hard on tires, brakes, and drivetrain components, yet treated as a rite of passage among muscle car owners going back to the cars’ original factory era. Tutorials like this one keep that tradition alive for a new generation of owners who may have inherited or bought a 1970s automatic muscle car without ever learning the specific technique required to do it properly, bridging a knowledge gap that’s easy to overlook until you’re the one behind the wheel trying and failing to get the tires to break loose.

The Cross-Promotion to ‘Car Sounds With Mouth 3’

The video description points viewers toward a related upload titled “Car Sounds With Mouth 3,” part of a recurring bit on the channel where the host recreates engine and exhaust noises using only his own voice. That kind of self-referential cross-promotion is common on smaller car-culture channels working to build a back catalog of watchable content around a single recognizable personality, and it signals that the burnout tutorial isn’t a one-off stunt video but part of a broader, personality-driven content strategy built around McVick’s presence in front of the camera as much as behind the wheel.

How Fast the Comment Section Turned Into a Highlight Reel

Several commenters treated individual seconds of the video like highlight moments in their own right, with one admitting they had “liked and saved” the clip within the first eight seconds and another simply writing “that was insane” without elaborating further. A different commenter joked about the tire smoke pouring out of the exhaust as though the engine’s cylinders themselves were being “sent” out the tailpipe, a bit of absurdist humor that’s become common shorthand in car-culture comment sections for describing a genuinely violent burnout. That rapid-fire, meme-adjacent reaction pattern is part of why short driving clips like this one tend to outperform longer, more technical build videos in pure engagement.

What First-Time Burnout Attempts Get Wrong

Commenters asked directly in the video’s own top comment what their first burnout car was, sparking a thread of nostalgic replies about early attempts that mostly ended in stalled engines or barely-there tire chirps rather than the dramatic smoke shown here. The gap between those failed first attempts and the clean technique demonstrated in this video is exactly the instructional value Sick McVick is selling: not just showing off a capable car, but breaking down the specific pedal sequence that separates a forgettable attempt from a genuinely impressive one.

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