1515 1.5y very hot

[lutach]

For the motor to smoke running with or without a load just simply means something failed within the motor. The only part of the motor that would cause it to smoke is the copper winding. Now the heat issue only came because you held the throttle for too long. It doesn't matter if you applied half a throttle. When a wind shorts out, you get heat. The good thing I hope is that your ESC came out ok as some times it will fail too. Most motors will never reach a high enough AMP unloaded to cause anything to fail like this. So one of the phase failed and the cause could be that it was due to fail or the ESC made a mistake switching the wrong phase.