Firefighters are not impressed by the latest trend among some Dunedin car enthusiasts - indoor burn-outs.
The disappointment comes after members of the St Kilda Fire Brigade raced to a suspected garage fire on Hillside Rd, Dunedin, on Saturday afternoon.
St Kilda senior station officer Ben Pitelen said a member of the public had raised the alarm after detecting a smoke-clogged garage shortly after noon.
However, instead of tackling a blazing inferno, the brigade members arrived to find a group of young men spinning the wheels of their car, filling the garage with smoke.
"It's something the young ones seem to do now.
"They wheel spin it in the garage until they fill it up with smoke.
"People smell it and give us a call.
"It's about the third one I've been to this year - it's a new phenomenon."
Aside from putting up with the "horrible smell" of burnt rubber, the brigade's firefighters were not required to take any other action, he said.
The young men responsible were spoken to by firefighters, who "just recommended they didn't make a habit of it", Mr Pitelen said.
Also on Saturday, the brigade's firefighters extinguished a small scrub fire burning beside a building at Forbury School, in South Dunedin, about 2pm.
Mr Pitelen said the fire appeared to have been deliberately lit and burnt about 10sq m of bushes and a tree beside the concrete wall of a school building.
A delivery person may have inadvertently been responsible for a small scrub fire in Mosgiel, following a hedge fire at the intersection of Church and Cargill Sts on Saturday.
Mosgiel Fire Brigade station officer Russell Turnbull said the brigade was called out twice to the incident - once at 12.45pm to extinguish the hedge, and again at 1.25pm after suspected hot embers from the first fire ignited a pile of bark across the street.
Mr Turnbull said the cause of the first fire appeared "a little bit suspicious", as a pile of pamphlets was found "about the same place as the fire as the fire started".
