When you’re driving a classic car worth seven figures, a fire under the hood is potentially devastating.
Although Clint Brunner doesn't really consider himself a car collector, he owns nearly 30 vehicles, including one that's rarely seen outside a museum: a CSX 4000 series Shelby Cobra, an aluminum-bodied continuation car powered by a 427 side-oiler.
One fall afternoon, Clint and his son took the Cobra out for a quick drive to circulate the fluids before the South Dakota winter set in. Almost immediately, he noticed the engine wasn't running right. The carburetor was flooding.
Clint pulled over and began adjusting the carburetor. He reset the floats, changed power valves, replaced needles and seats. But the problem wouldn’t go away.
"I was looking down the throats of the carburetor when the backfire happened," he recalls. "It was kind of a mini explosion, with a fireball maybe two to three feet high."
There was no time to hesitate. "If I'd had to wait for a fire truck," Clint says, "the car would have been gone."
Mounted in the passenger footwell was an H3R clean-agent extinguisher Clint had installed years earlier, after experiencing fires in other vehicles.
He’d seen firsthand how quickly things could escalate.
In one instance, an improperly installed oil cap in his McLaren had allowed oil to spray onto a hot exhaust, igniting an engine fire.
Years before that, while driving to pick up his kids from school, Clint witnessed a Corvette crash and roll directly in front of him, catching fire. Being the first person on the scene, he dragged the driver out through a broken window and stayed with him until help arrived, as the Corvette burned to the ground.
"I guess I've had plenty of experience with vehicle fires," he says. "If you don't have a fire extinguisher, you're pretty helpless. All you can do is try to get everybody to safety and watch a precious vehicle go up in flames."
On this day, in the Shelby Cobra, Clint was ready.
He pulled the pin, aimed, and discharged the clean agent extinguisher.
"It worked beautifully," he says. "In six or seven seconds, the fire was completely out."
Just as important: there was no mess.
The only visible evidence of the fire was a little soot on the Cobra's air box, known to enthusiasts as the "turkey pan."
"It was a huge relief," Clint says. "Not just that the fire was out, but to see that there was no damage, and no mess to clean up afterward."
He knows exactly how different the outcome could have been.
Years earlier, Clint had an engine fire in a 1968 Hurst Hemi Dart, a historically significant race car, and put it out with a conventional dry chemical extinguisher.
"It left a film of yellow powder on everything," he explains. "It etched into the paint. It was just a very nasty mess to clean up. We had to repaint some parts, and some components would need to be professionally replated to fully restore them."
That experience permanently changed how he thinks about fire safety.
"Not only is it important to have a fire extinguisher," Clint says, "but if you care about the vehicle, you should think about what it looks like after you put out the fire. I'm a big believer in spending a little more money to make sure you have a clean agent extinguisher."
Thanks to H3R's Emergency Replacement Guarantee, Clint's Shelby Cobra is back on the road fully protected with a new clean agent extinguisher.
"That program is a classy thing to do," he says. "I have the chrome one, and it's a good looking unit. It’s a little bit of bling mounted to the floor. It even makes the car look a little racier."
But for Clint, the real value isn’t how it looks.
It’s the confidence of knowing that when a fire breaks out, he's ready.
"People just don't realize, until they've been through it, how quickly a fire can happen. If you aren't prepared, it can escalate into the loss of your car, if not worse. In the grand scheme of things, a few hundred dollars for a tool to put out a fire quickly is a wise investment."
— Clint Brunner
Protect What Can’t Be Replaced
Clean agent fire extinguishers help stop fires fast, without the damage of dry chemical. Plus, every H3R extinguisher is backed by our Emergency Replacement Guarantee.
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