Welcome to the Petrol Preserve!

On this website, I want to celebrate and promote the use of internal combustion engines for sports, leisure, and just for fun. Of course, diesel and gasoline engines are an indispensable tool for transport and industry. But even beyond their purposeful use, there's hardly an area of life where humans didn't manage to somehow introduce gas engines. Whether they're competing in motorsports events, enjoying some spare time activities with friends, or just powering their garden party with a gas-operated generator—people love to beef up all kinds of hobbies and pastimes by adding a few motors and plenty of fuel.

A varied and impassioned subculture has developed around the use of gas engines for fun, games, and sports. I call it petrol culture, or gasoline culture for any Americans out there. From kart racing to motocross, jet-skiing in the ocean, riding snowmobiles in the mountains, joyrides on the motor scooter, and radio-controlled model cars with gas engines—there's something for every taste and occasion. Regardless of age, gender, location, skills, views, and interests, there are appropriate motorsports and motorised hobbies for absolutely everybody. That's how diverse, inclusive, and welcoming petrol culture and its followers are.

These enjoyable, carefree, depending on one's views also thoughtless and unreasonable uses of gas engines are what these pages are all about. Here, I want to acknowledge and honour all the people who are wasting tons of fossil fuels on such frivolous uses, and encourage them to keep going. To everyone who secretly enjoys seeing the air being polluted senselessly and recklessly, I want to show that they don't have to feel ashamed and guilty for it, but that it's a completely natural and fairly common reaction. I want to help anyone interested in finding local events where they can watch and experience the air being needlessly contaminated. And for any visitors who want to take the next step and experience the thrill first-hand, I'll try to help by offering some ideas and pointers on the cheapest and most accessible ways to blow toxic exhaust fumes into nature just for fun!

Even when I was a little boy, the exhaust fumes of petrol engines occupied my mind a lot. As I was a very environmentally conscious kid, it made me very sad to see how casually and indifferently us humans polluted our nature. Wherever I spotted an exhaust pipe spewing out thick, stinking exhaust gas, I was so disgusted and outraged that I couldn't look away. The despicable smoke and the penetrating smell saddened and enraged me. I made a private promise to never use an internal combustion engine myself for as long as I lived.

But apart from my rational concern about exhaust fumes as a little tree hugger, there was apparently another reason why they were so tantalizing and captivating to me. I noticed that the sound of engines and the stench of exhaust also excited me in a visceral way. Not only that: I discovered that the more recklessly someone was polluting the air, the more devastating the pollution was, and the more pointless I found it to be – motorsports, warming up engines, or letting them idle for a long time – the more thrilling the situation felt to me. I even had a confusingly excited reaction when I saw seemingly healthy trees being cut down. Everything that was most upsetting to me as a would-be environmentalist gave me a massive adrenaline rush at the same time.

For some reason, that part of me felt a great pleasure whenever I had to witness the environment being contaminated and destroyed. It was an urge I couldn't suppress, so I started looking for situations of unscrupulous and senseless pollution in my everyday life, not just to deplore and condemn them internally as a tree hugger, but also appreciate and enjoy them as a lover of exhaust gas. Distressed because of the moral conflict this was causing with my environmental conscience, I kept trying to suppress those feelings. But ultimately, I gave in to the desire. I didn't want to just watch anymore, so I started arranging for situations in which I could play around with running engines and pollute the air with exhaust fumes of my own – deliberately without any purpose.

Why I created this website

At some point, I decided that this fight against my "dark side" was hopeless and that life was too short. Instead of being embarrassed about my passion for exhaust fumes, I wanted to go the opposite way and celebrate it. That's when I decided to create my first website about the joys and pleasures of exhaust fumes and senseless air pollution. I had collected many pictures of exhaust gas, scenes of air pollution which I found particularly stirring and alluring, and used them to illustrate what I liked about it. I also shared some theories I had come up with on how such a strange fondness could have come to be. What happened next caught me by surprise: I realised that I wasn't the only person on the planet with these thoughts and feelings.

Soon I started regularly getting e-mails from people who were secretly also into exhaust fumes, and recognised themselves in my descriptions. Many of them even told me similar stories: starting from a strong sense of environmentalism, followed by years of suppressing the conflicting feelings, and being especially thrilled by situations where the pollution was caused mindlessly or without purpose. But most importantly, many of those who were writing to me were grateful to have found the site and finally know that there are other people who understand. On the one hand, there seem to be many thousands, if not millions of people that secretly have a thing for petrol exhaust. On the other hand, most of them instinctively assume that they're the only ones in the world who are crazy in that way.

That's why I decided to revive my website. I want to allow many, many more "closeted" exhaust fume enthusiasts to find out that they're not alone, that they can find like-minded people and exchange stories and thoughts.

Who else I'm writing for

On a separate page about me, I write in much more detail about how I discovered my love for exhaust fumes, and how my approach to it changed over the years. That little biography is probably most interesting to those visitors who have recognised glimpses of themselves in the short version above. But maybe there are some "outsiders", who find this whole thing awfully bizarre, but still would like to learn a little more about it?

I try to find a balance between these two target audiences on the site. Of course, the site is mainly written for those who share my passion for exhaust fumes, people who are attracted to stories, reports, photos, and videos of pointless air pollution. But I hope to also give random visitors a glimpse into this world of weird feelings and thoughts, and maybe even make it somewhat intelligible to them, to the point that that's even possible. Hopefully, it will at least be comprehensible in the sense that we all have our quirks, kinks, and dirty little secrets. And because barely anyone else is writing about mine, I'll try to do it as exhaustively and descriptively as I can.

Finally, I'm also writing these pages for myself. As incomprehensible as these fondnesses might be for others, they're still a huge mystery to myself, too. How can it be that a human being can find the contamination of its own environment, the desecration and destruction of its own basis of existence, so arousing? Biologically, we should be drawn to partners who ensure the highest chance of survival for potential offspring – so it's completely paradoxical that I was always most attracted to women who were recklessly polluting the environment our children would be growing up in. Is this penchant something instinctive and primal, or did it emerge out of certain influences during early childhood? By collecting my thoughts on these pages, and exchanging theories with visitors, maybe I'll find out a little more about it.

Whether you were brought here by your exhaust fume fetish, pure curiosity, or mere coincidence: I welcome you to my little, virtual petrol preserve.