How to drive - around corners

I thought, since it is Friday, why not talk about something less serious and yet still useful. When I learnt to drive, most cars available still didn't steer or brake very well, and, luckily, generally didn't have that much power either. These days though it is easy to buy a new or second-hand standard car that is equivalent or much better than the 'fast' versions of standard production cars of back when I was a lad, especially in terms of the potential to get around corners or to stop. With a very tired and ageing 850cc Mini, I had to learn how to drive merely to keep up with the traffic, let alone get past it, but i had to learn through practice and thinking, as publications on how to do it were effectively non-existent, while techniques that did get passed around were often wrong.

At the moment the roads are wet, not as slippery as they were a few days ago after a night's worth of snow, but still interesting, reminiscent of the couple of weeks I spent with my brother, David, in northern Italy driving around with our friend's stock Mini 1000. We were there as part of a charity Mini event, and it quickly became clear that despite how much many people had invested in the engine and suspension departments, they simply had no idea how to drive quickly except in a straight line. So, what were they failing to understand in getting their cars to go around corners quickly? The answer, I feel, is still of relevance, because i still see people driving very capable cars incapably around corners.

First we need to establish some terminology, a toolbox of words and concepts we can use to describe what we and our cars are doing when going around corners. Imagine that you are driving around a roundabout in the wet, that your car was rear wheel drive, and you had any anti-whatever system switched off. It would not take you long to discover that if you put your foot hard on the gas pedal you would end up facing the roundabout as the rear of the car broke loose and tried to overtake the front of the car. This is 'oversteer'.

'Understeer' is the opposite. If you drive a standard front wheel drive car around the same roundabout faster and faster, eventually, no matter how hard you turn the steering, the car will just drive off the roundabout. Many accidents are caused in icy conditions where the steering does not seem to work and the car ploughs on ahead and off the road - this is understeer, generally.

'Sliding' is the third condition, where all four wheels loose traction. It is quite hard to slide sideways, more often you end up in understeer or oversteer (and spinning the car), but it can be easy to lock up all four wheels while braking in the straight ahead direction while on ice - a very dangerous thing to do.

My Citroen C1 will slide gently sideways on very wet or slightly icy roads, and I can make it do it well enough that the passengers and onlookers generally do not notice. What is important is a small piece of philosophy: you will find frequent references to 'car control', an internet search on this phrase will dig up lots of references to car safety, skid pans and the police, but it is the wrong perspective. You cannot control your car, and attempts to will result in stiff 'learned techniques'. It might sound dumb or pedantic, but you really need to achieve is 'car management' - your car is a powerful tool, and like any tool, advanced users do not control the tool, but manage the effect of the tool. That gnarly old craftsman points his tool in the directions he would like it to go, and lets the tool do its work under his direction. There is no struggle for control. My Citroen C1 drifts gently and unnoticed because i am the only one listening to the car, I am the only one who has learned to feel where it is going - and because I have learned to listen to my 'tool', observed it, I have been able to learn how to direct its energy. Zen? maybe, though why listening, feeling and observing should be limited solely to a far Eastern religion, I fail to understand.

Oversteer and understeer occur because if there is a significant difference in 'traction' (how well the tyres/tires stick to the road) between the front tyres and the rear tyres while driving around a corner. If there is less traction at the back than at the front, you get oversteer. If there is less traction at the front than at the back, you get understeer.

My Citroen C1 is front wheel drive and can easily be made to understeer on the icy roads around the garages and car parking area near our flats, and so I drive extra carefully there as I have no wish to hit anything, car, curb or person. If I had a rear wheel drive car under the same conditions it would be easy to get it to 'fish-tail' where a little too much gas and the rear end of the car begins to slide out sideways, you overcompensate and it slides out the other way, and so on, a very scary experience, and one to which my old 1973 Vauxhall Viva Coupe was highly prone!

You can get a front wheel drive car to go into oversteer, you 'merely' have to engineer a situation where the front wheels have more grip than the rear wheels, and there are a couple of ways of achieving this. Traction depends on the friction available on the ground (is the tarmac wet, dry or icy, or dusty?), the tyres (cheap/expensive, hot/cold, new/worn out), vehicle speed, and the vehicle weight on the tyres.

The weight on the tyres is very important. Get a bicycle and strap the brakes so that they are locked on and try to pull the bicycle - it will drag a bit, bounce a little, but you can pull it. Now sit someone on the bicycle and try to pull it - probably impossible to move it unless you have used a small child or you are uncommonly strong.

If you drive down a straight, dry road and hit the brakes hard, you can feel the front of the car go down, and the rear of the car rises. This is called 'weight transfer', and it increases momentarily the load on the front wheels while at the same time removing the load on the rear wheels. Anything that you do that alters how 'nose up' or 'nose down' your car is, will effect the traction on the front or rear wheels. As an example, if you accelerate hard in a straight line, you can feel the front of the car rise and the rear of the car drop, which is great for a rear-wheel drive car as it gives you more traction on the driven wheels, but not so great for front-wheel drive cars as the driven wheels (front wheels) are more likely to spin.

Imagine me in my C1, drifting gently sideways in the wet, how do I manage it? well, first you have to be doing some speed, not 5 miles per hour (mph), but first time out not more than about 30 mph. The C1's natural tendency if you corner hard will be to understeer, so you need some way of increasing the traction at the front, or reducing it at the rear. You could try pulling the handbrake on hard - that will lock the back wheels up, but it is not the most elegant method and has the disadvantage that you have to take one hand off the wheel. The handbrake is a worthy tool for altering the traction of the rear wheels, but mostly its use is for fun situations because of the problem of having only one hand on the wheel.

The 'trick', if you could call it that, is in the steering. One way of escaping understeer is to reduce the amount of steering you have applied to the steering wheel - basically, back off the steering towards the straight-ahead position until the front wheels point in the direction the car is sliding. Instead of sliding, the front wheels will start rolling again instead of sliding, and you will have regained some control. More to the point, unless the surface is pure ice, you will rapidly have more grip at the front - the tyres will bite and tend to pull the front of the car down, and transferring weight off the rear wheels as it does so. What is more, if you balance a ruler on a cup, say, and push gently down on one end of the ruler, the other end will tend to lift, but if instead of pushing you tap the end of the ruler then the other end of the ruler will jump up. If you suddenly get more grip at the front, it will pull the front of the car down quite quickly and the rear of the car will be momentarily left with little weight. A lot of grip at the front and little at the rear will put you into oversteer, it only lasts a moment but can result in a significant sideways movement at the rear of the car, helping to rotate the car in the direction you are trying to turn it.

Quickly apply more steering, let it go into understeer for a moment and then back off the steering again to get that rear end oversteer. You end up 'sawing' at the steering wheel, moving it about 30 or 40 degrees, back and forth. Get it right, and the car will appear to float, drifting in the direction you want, facing in the direction you plan to exit the corner.

It might sound a little unlikely, but down in the Alps in a standard 998cc Mini, I once did it in the straight ahead position as I waited for a good moment to pass the car in front - the front wheels were actually spinning faster than the road speed, the car rotating gently left and right, until I stopped sawing on the steering wheel, the car sank and the Mini accelerated remarkably rapidly.

On another occasion, to test the theory, I kept up 50 mph into a right-hand bend that tightened up significantly as you drove around it, until the Mini went into understeer. A quick left-right, the rear end stepped out and we were suddenly pointing in the exit direction.

Go out and find yourself a nice damp road with good visibility, no traffic, and plenty of safe run-off area, start off at about 40 mph and play with your front wheel drive car and see what you can do with it!