Originally Posted by cmac2012

A regular starter is a torque monster with the single largest wire/cable in the car, going directly from the battery to the starter. The solenoid pushes a small gear into a space next to a large geared ring on the flywheel and it turns it from scratch, no building up of inertia as with the starter in the vid. If you run it for as long as that starter is run in the vid, you could well fry it. I'm still a little shocked that starters can turn the motor over fast enough to start it. I just put one in my SDL and you know you're hanging onto a powerful sucker.

Word I read is that Charles Kettering (name famous today largely for the Sloan Kettering Cancer Clinic), who also invented the coil and breaker points ignition system, invented the starter after a friend of his was badly injured by kickback from a hand starter on a Cadillac. IIRC he eventually died from his injuries. Kettering was a monster inventor, large parts of the auto as we have long known it sprang from his brain.

That is an interesting car in the OP, you know it's a monster when you have a guy ready with a fire extinguisher to nip the scorched earth thing in the bud. That starter motor appears to be a design that can run at high rpm for an extended period compared to the starter motors we normally use.

*ETA*

I had the story of the starter mostly right. Just read Kettering's wiki page, it's an interesting read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Kettering