YouTuber Watches His $400,000 Ferrari Turn Into a Texas Cornfield Bonfire While the Crew Scrambles With Gatorade

Cody Detwiler, better known as WhistlinDiesel, has built an entire YouTube career around taking expensive vehicles to places they were never meant to go and then documenting what happens when they inevitably fall apart. In August 2023, that formula produced one of his most memorable disasters when his red Ferrari F8 Tributo caught fire while ripping through a harvested cornfield outside Waco, Texas, eventually taking a rental Chrysler Pacifica and a good chunk of the crew’s gear with it.⁠

The plan, according to Detwiler, was another durability test in a series he’d been filming with the car. He’d bought the F8 for roughly $400,000 earlier that year with the explicit goal of eventually destroying it on camera. On this particular day, temperatures were pushing into the 110s. The field was full of dry corn stover, cut stalks and leftover plant material that had been baking in the Texas heat. Detwiler was driving the mid-engine Ferrari through it while the rest of the crew filmed from a rented Pacifica that had only a few thousand miles on it.

What started as a relatively controlled (if extremely dumb) off-road session turned into a full emergency within minutes. Crew members spotted flames under the rear of the Ferrari, likely ignited by the combination of hot exhaust components and the dry debris packed around the wheels and underbody. They stopped the car and piled out. Someone yelled for water. There was none. The closest thing available turned out to be Gatorade and Red Bull, which they tried to use on the growing fire while Detwiler and others shouted about keeping the flames off the rest of the field so it didn’t become a larger wildfire.

It didn’t work. The fire spread quickly across the dry ground and jumped to the Pacifica, which had been parked nearby. The crew grabbed what they could—phones, some equipment, personal items, while calling 911. In the footage, Detwiler stands in the middle of the chaos wearing overalls and a cowboy hat, at one point telling the camera something close to “Well, there goes half a million dollars, I guess.” He later clarified that he was more annoyed about the rental van than the Ferrari itself.⁠

Firefighters eventually arrived and contained the blaze before it spread across the entire field, but both vehicles were total losses. The Ferrari’s carbon-ceramic brakes and titanium exhaust were among the few pieces that held up reasonably well; most of the car, including the engine and interior, was gone. Detwiler has maintained that none of it was staged. In a pinned comment on the video, he noted that personal items, camera gear, tools, and even Polaroid photos went up with the vehicles, and that burning a rental van full of equipment wouldn’t make sense if he were trying to fake it.⁠

The video, titled “The Fastest Way to Lose Half a Million Dollars. My Ferrari is Gone,” quickly racked up millions of views. Detwiler has since treated the wreckage as content as well, at one point selling small cubes made from shredded remnants of the car. Insurance was minimal; companies had reportedly been reluctant to fully cover someone with his track record of destroying vehicles on purpose.

For anyone who follows WhistlinDiesel, the outcome felt almost inevitable. Driving a mid-engine Ferrari through a field of dry corn stover on a scorching day and expecting nothing to catch fire is the kind of decision that only makes sense if the primary goal is footage. In that sense, the video delivered exactly what his audience has come to expect: an expensive car, a terrible idea, and a surprisingly calm reaction while everything burns in the background. The Ferrari is gone. The content remains.