All too often we forget that there is a heavy buzz-saw sitting near our feet in our car.
Your flywheel spins at thousands of revolutions per-minute, as a large rotating mass of metal attached to the back of the engine, ready to carve through the thin sheetmetal around it if anything goes wrong, which it can given the forces of inertia at play as RPM increase.
No production cars get near the RPM of a tuned-up Mazda rotary, so the stresses on the flywheel and clutch assembly don’t get much more severe than in these little triangle motors of doom.
And, at Rotary Revival 6, held last Sunday at Sydney Motorsport Park, it all turned wrong for a car known as APE100. After bashing the rev-limiter for a few bursts, the flywheel and clutch spectacularly come apart on deceleration, to the point part of the clutch cover is sticking out the bonnet!
Iain Kelly is the rotor head behind The Creators Online.
Is this the worst flywheel explosion you've ever seen? Let us know in the comments.