Safe Speed Forums

similar to what Jackie Stewart says "when in doubt, both feet out". Once the brakes are on at least you know where you're going. Although you may not want to go there...

oops

Loads. Indispensable. Great value. And lots of fun.

But it's hard to know if you can really learn enough in a one day course to save yourself if it goes wrong on the road.

And I'm worried about the 'skid cars' they use these days. I've tried two different ones (the cradle sort and the steerable wheels sort) and I really didn't think either was adequately realistic.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I was lucky enough to get my training for free. It is fantastic fun, but in my view completely useless as training for road driving unless you can practise a lot. The reason being that on the skid pan the surface is very slippery, but very consistant and you know when the skid is going to happen. On the road you generally only get into a skid if you misjudge the road surface (I found out the hard way about that one ) or you are going too fast. Either way there's not enough space to recover like there is on the skid pan.

If you want an enjoyable day out then go for it, but don't expect it to improve your road driving much.

I have but it was pretty strange. Great fun though. About 10 years ago, Blackburn Council had a subsidised skid pan. A group of us from work got together and had an evening on it with an instructor. It was great fun but (see earlier post) the cars were front wheel drive saloons (Escort and a Toyota I think) with over-inflated bald rear tyres. The surface was kept wet with water jets. Naturally, the cars didn't handle quite like front wheel drives or rear wheel drives. That said, you could certainly practice car control and got a feel for the sorts of signals that came up through your backside jus tat the point where things started to go pear-shaped. the downside is that it happened at such low speeds that it might even have given a slightly false sense of confidence in being able to handle the real-life situation if it ever arose.

In my view, the only way is to spend a great deal of money. A colleague who did most of the high-speed test driving was lucky enough to go on a John Lyons 3 day residential OWN CAR course. This costs you a set of tyres as well as a lot of money but it comprised real road work as well as skid pan stuff. He was already a good driver when he went but he still learned a lot - mainly observation skills though. His car control was already pretty good.

see thats exactly what i mean..... i don't know what he was responding to but he reacts to the slide way too late and then just gives up!

At least he remembered the golden rule: when the car is well and truly planted into a pond, put the handbrake on to stop it...errr...floaring away?

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I wonder if he remembered to lock it when he got out?

I found the best skidpans were frosty car parks in winter. Hours of 'training' ie fun improved my unconscious ( lizard brain ) response to loss of grip and fwd and Rwd cars no end. That way one responds in a couple of hundred msec whereas analysing the probelm and thinking out a response will almost always be too late on the road.

Trouble is in todays intolerant climate on MoP will compain and the BiB will no doubt be there like a shot to report perople trying this now.

There is a great deal of difference between tarmac and gravel ( or even sealed roads with a lot of grit on them ). Gravel has a higher dynamic coefficient atr a reasonable sliding speed and tarmac lower. Putting power down in a car with reasonable power margin will certainly give a thrust vector to counter the centrifugal understeer.

Yes, I used to go out in snowy/icy car parks and slide about a bit to see what my car did. Useful but the onset of slip on much higher grip surfaces feels quite different.

Does anyone else think that the grit/salt used nowadays is more slippery than in the old days - or do I just have a more powerful car?

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

FAR more slippery. And I'm driving a campervan. I feel the front wheel slip angle on every curve at the moment.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

So i'm not the only one - like Roger found that a lot of times in earlier years i'd corrected skid without thinking due to getting brain to autodetect skids..
More slippery -possibly, or is it due to getting "shined" by people with heavy right foot.Personally i prefer "virgin" snow-more grip than treated roads.

re: skidpan and other training... yeh probably good for you.

but don't expect it to save you on the road, it might help, but like i think mr moley says there are alot more things out of your control on the road and even an experienced, trained driver can get caught out when not expecting it.

Low temperatures will drop the tyre pressures, too, which can have a similar effect on the steering feel.

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Peter Humphries (and a green V8S)

Similar? Soggy and heavy is similar to 'going light'? I don't get it at all.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
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The one way it can really save you on the road is that you can learn to detect the limit of grip much earlier and stay well away from the scary unpredictable stuff.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Not the kind I went on. The cars were too unrepresentative and the speeds at which it all started to happen were extremely low. The best it could do was to get one used to the sensations that occur as it starts to slide but if anything, it lulled us into a false sense of security because it all happened at such low speeds that it was (fairly) easy to catch the car, and on the occasions where we missed it, we didn't travel more than a car length or so before stopping.

All good stuff this, but I am reminded by some of vonhosen's posts on ADUK whereby he generally states that in normal driving you should never get to a stage where the car is skidding.

I must admit, though, I do experiment with throttle-adjusted lines on the entry slips onto the M6 Toll; more gas mid corner = wider line, off the gas = tighter line.

Love that Google clip!

Whilst watching it, I was looking at his approach to the right hander and was thinking "hehehehe.........you aint gonna keep this f***er on the island chief"!

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Simon

Here is (arguably) a better one.

Ari Vatenan with Terry Harryman in an Opel Manta, on the 1983 Manx Rally.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... manx+rally

Amazing to watch in slow motion, to see how much opposite lock he applies, how quickly, and most importantly how quickly he takes it off again!

Ok he's in a seriously overpowered, twitchy eighties RWD rally car, but even so it is a perfect demonstration of how difficult high speed slides are to control - is there anyone on this forum who thinks they'd have made it through the gateway too?

Thought not...

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Absolutely. But sooner or later you might well find that the environment has changed on you. Roundabouts contaminated with diesel are probably the most likely nasty surprise.



Developing that sensitivity can really help you to keep everything smooth and balanced. But take great care because there are two 'hazards' where the behaviour suddenly changes...

Too much power in a lower gear and you'll get wheelspin. In rear wheel drive that means 'power oversteer'. In front wheel drive it probably means more understeer.

Lifting off during faster cornering can give rise to lift-off oversteer. What happens here is that the forwards weight transfer of lifting off suddenly results in insufficient rear grip and away she goes. Lift-off oversteer catches out many thousands each year. It's sudden and it's hard to catch. A big part of the problem is that lifting off is a very 'natural' reaction if you find yourself cornering too hard. This is where sensitivity comes back in - you can lift off and if you find that you're cornering too hard you should lift off, but not too fast and not too completely.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

yeah but the manufacturers are wise to this and try to tune the chassis on the assumption that the driver will react the way most drivers do to an unforeseen "situation". A case in point is my brother's Skyline. It's the R32 version so it doesn't have a huge amount of power and it's only 2WD. It does, however, have 4 wheel steering. We spent a bit of time on Bruntingthorpe with it not long after he got it, on some scrap tyres. I found that when I pushed it too far into a bend, it was remarkably forgiving - up until it snapped and then I couldn't catch it. As soon as we pulled the fuse out of the 4 wheel steer system (I think they call it "Hi-cass"), I found it much easier to catch - albeit at lower speeds.

I think this highlights a big problem these days.

My mate has a 1950 Riley. Bless it, with about 50bhp and weighing in at a ton and a half. It's on a live axle with big cross-ply tyres on it. When you push it too far, it oversteers but it gives you about 3 days written warning that it's going to do so! It's also so under-powered that pretty much as soon as it steps out of line, it scrubs off enough speed to come back straight again.

How many of us learned to drive in cars like this? Morris Minors, Marinas, A35s, Mk. 1 Escorts???

I also had the use of a TVR 390 (the wedge shaped ones) in the early 1990s and again, that was similar but obviously it all happened at higher speeds and it was possible to maintain a slide for a bit longer than the Riley using the throttle.

The Skyline was a very different animal with it's 4 wheel steer connected. I just wasn't good enough to throw it sideways and hold it there. I gather the later R34 versions with 4 wheel drive can be driven staggeringly sideways almost indefinitely but I've never tried one.

The point is, cars are getting too good for me now. I think I probably speak for the majority of Joe Numpties too. They never get the chance to have a "moment" at relatively low speed and then when they do, it's often only because several layers of computer assistance have already failed in their task to keep him straight and, frankly, he hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of retrieving the situation AND is probably going fast enough to do himself (and others) some serious damage!

I wonder if that's part of the reason why "Ks" remain pretty static but "SIs" are (allegedly) dropping?