AVONDALE, LA — If you visit the Nola Motorsports Park in Avondale, you can drive a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. You can also take racing karts for a spin. And soon, you’ll be able to try your hand at using a flamethrower.
“It’s like bowling, but it’s a lot hotter,” said Brannon LeBouef, the owner of the Nolatac Training Center. LeBouef’s business is in the Nola Motorsports Park. Soon he hopes to open his doors to the public to allow people the opportunity to use one of his flamethrowers.
LeBouef will provide people with the training, supervision and safety equipment. He says the flamethrower opportunity is a great addition to all the other activities in the park.
“It’s obviously something that’s conducive to bachelor parties, corporate events. We can weave these types of activities and fun things into team building types of events. First dates. That’ll definitely let you know where you guys stand on certain political issues,” LeBouef told WGNO.
Flamethrowers have been in the news recently thanks to a tweet from Elon Musk, the man who started the Tesla car company. Musk revealed that he planned to sell 20,000 flamethrowers at a price of about $500 each. Within days, pre-orders nearly reaching the maximum mark.
“There’s about 2 or 3 companies right now that have different versions of them out,” LeBouef says.
LeBouef says the flamethrowers are based on old technology but updated with new looks and reliability.
“This is literally a war-time, World War I relic, this technology of the flame thrower. Here we are in 2018, it looks a lot nicer, a lot sleeker, a lot slimmer, and a lot more fun, and definitely a lot safer,” he said.
LeBouef also plans to offer people the opportunity to shoot fully automatic machine guns on his business’ firearms range. He also has a small squadron of remote control airplanes that will eventually be used as moving targets for customers to shoot with shotguns.
“It’s pretty much an adrenaline park,” he says of the facility.
If you’d like to follow LeBouef’s business to know when the flamethrowers or other opportunities will be available to the public, just check out the Nolatac Training Center or the Drone Shooting NOLA Facebook pages.