Irrlicht Engine

Hello guys, I've been working on a futuristic racer but I've run into an issue. I'm new into the 3d world and I've been wondering, what's the best* way to implement the exhaust-glow effect?

* By that I mean the most efficient in terms of speed, ease of use and reuseability

For instance, something like this


I've been thinking about it all day but I'm clueless . I considered creating a cylinder in blender but that would be messy since the normals would point outward and the glow would be invisible from the inside.
I also tried the billboard in SpecialFX but it runs slowly when adding subdivisions to make it look smoother .

Is there a simple way, without an external library?

I've looked into some games and I saw that the glow is a seperate model-particle-whatever and it's loaded beforehand.

IVolumeLight worked like a charm as long as the scale doesn't exceed 10, After that you loose around 5 fps per 10.0f. No clue why.

You may also achieve this by using two perpendicular quads with appropriate textures without killing the fps.

Regards,
smso

you can also achieve this with one quad that rotates to face the camera.