Showing off is a dangerous business these days. Twenty years ago you could make an ass of yourself at a car meet and if a stunt went south you’d only have to live with friends ribbing you about it for years to come.

But make a fool of yourself today and you’ll be plastered all over YouTube and Reddit in short order, that one mistake saved for posterity for the world to see. And the worse thing is, so many people are waiting to capture that YT gold, whether it’s recording someone getting viciously beaten by muggers, making a mess of a parking maneuver, or simply about to grenade the transmission in their Nissan 300ZX, that nobody bothers to step in and help out.

Helping out in this case would have involved telling the driver of this Z32 Nissan 300ZX that the epic burnout he clearly thinks he’s performing for the crowd is a figment of his own imagination.

It’s the kind of video we’ve seen dozens of times before. After bouncing his V6 off the limiter the young driver appears to pop the clutch, but when the car lurches forward he fails to notice that wheels aren’t spinning, and keeps his right foot planted, apparently believing he’s performing a rolling burnout.

Related: Man Tries, And Fails, To Do A Burnout In A Mercedes-AMG C63, Car Erupts On Fire

A good 10 seconds pass during which the 3.0-liter V6 is saved from oblivion by its rev limiter, but no one bothers to save the driver, or his transmission, by stepping forward to let him know all is not as well as he thinks it is.

A puff of smoke appears on the passenger side, but the driver doesn’t seem to notice it’s coming from the front of the car. The shower of orange sparks and sickening bang that follows certainly gets his attention though, and his mouth drops wider than the hole he’s probably just blown in his bellhousing. We can’t be sure exactly how much damage the ZX suffered, but the chunks of molten clutch left on the floor behind suggest it didn’t get home under its own steam.

You could take the moral high ground and say anyone dumb enough to willingly perform a burnout in a public place to show off for a barrage of camera phones deserves everything they get. But most of us have done some stupid things in cars for fun. Should people at car meets be more community minded and step in to save a fellow car enthusiast from doing something that’s going to leave him out of pocket and without a ride for a week? Or should we just let nature (and the laws of physics and stupidity) take its course? Leave a comment and let us know.