In order to foster deep geothermal energy exploitation, a substantial reduction of the drilling costs is required. Spallation drilling is an alternative non-contact technique which would eliminate bit’s wearing related issues and increase the rate of perforation in hard crystalline rocks. However, its applicability is quite challenging and, furthermore, the spallation mechanisms do not work in soft rock formations. Therefore, a hybrid technique combining conventional mechanical and spallation drilling could be the sought breakthrough in the drilling research. Here, a flame-jet heats up the surface weakening the rock material which is then exported by PDC drill bits. An important advantage of this technique is the smoothening effect on the mechanical properties of the rock formation. Although literature presents a large amount of experimental studies about rock strength variation due to oven treatments, no investigations were found for the effects of flame thermal treatments. Therefore, an ad-hoc study is needed in order to precisely assess the consequences on the final strength of the material. Thus, in this work, the influences of temperature (until 650 ◦C), heating rate (from 0.17 to 40 ◦C/s) and confinement (until 150 Nm of tightening torque) on the material’s strength for Rohrschach sandstone and Grimsel granite are investigated. Material’s strength is measured by means of the scratch test and petrographic thin sections are used to vali- date the results. Data showed that the flame treatments lead to a monotonous decrease of strength with temperature, differently to the oven treatment where an initial increase of strength is observed. Regarding the final drilling application, two optimal operating conditions in terms of heating rate and maximum temperature are found. Besides, important variations of thermal diffusivity, conductivity and heat capacity with temperature are measured. The observed irreversible decay after the first heating cycle was justified by remarkable thermal cracking phenomena. Furthermore, an analytic approach based on Green’s functions has been developed in order to model the heat transfer phenomena for moving heat sources.