Despite his immense talent, Alex Mirea does occasionally get it wrong. It’s only natural that someone pushing as hard as he does on bumpy public roads should eventually end up in a ditch. He’s done it in his agile EK4 Civic — and now he’s done it in his newest hillclimber: a wildly modified Audi A4 with more than 500 horsepower.

In between these two cars, Mirea sported a pretty sorted E36 M3, which, with an E46 M3’s S54 powering it, had no difficulty roasting the rears. Therefore, Mirea grew more comfortable with an oversteering car, so even when he moved on to a four-wheel drive platform, the sideways antics didn’t stop.

His driving style is quite smooth, and most of the time his A4 pulls cleanly out of corners. However, with the throttle matted, the Audi does dance nervously over bumps. In those situations, he usually chooses to power oversteer his way out of a bobble, as seen in the footage above (2:31).

The Audi’s 1.8-liter motor drives all four wheels. While the turbocharged torque can break the rear out of line, at the end of the day, it is an Audi A4. Therefore, the front wheels can occasionally break loose, and Mirea shows just how quickly the car can go from being relatively docile to terminal understeer.

Despite a confident start and obvious comfort with a slithering tail, his run in the footage above goes wrong without much warning. With his foot hard on the brake and the steering wheel cranked to the left, the front simply doesn’t bite, and he’s spat off into the weeds (1:07).

Almost as soon as the car lands on its side, the flames begin to pour out from the right side of the hood, where the turbocharger is mounted. That gives him a little added incentive to extricate himself from the flaming A4, before “fire under his ass” becomes something more than just another phrase about motivation.