Fecking County Fecking Durham

Steer into the skid. I'm assuming the ABS works then Cadence braking isn't an issue. Once your on the slide you're pretty much a spectator. Your only hope it to regain steering first then traction. Having traction without steering is just as likely to make matters worse. Drive like you've got a full bucket of water on the bonnet and you don't want to spill any. Ice on gradients with momentum is a real tricky to deal with. Anyone who suggests other wise is either deluded, too rich or driving a stolen / works motor in which case they are Ice gurus.

Skid pans are also simpler to drive because you are putting the vehicle in to a skid yourself.. on black ice you just never really know until you're on the go.

On or around Sun, 2 Nov 2008 23:49:46 -0000, "Lee_D" enlightened us thusly:

Unless you find that thing where the car sits on a cradle and the bloke in the passenger seat can turn the grip off.

I'll just add, especially in a diesel motor: if in low gear, don't lift off too suddenly or too much - there's enough engine braking to lose traction on ice.

Personally, I find "steer into the skid" comes naturally, but it's only gonna work really early on, once you're sideways in the road, you've had it.

Been wasting a lot of time recently with a thing called "Project Torque". You need a steering wheel for the 'puter, though. Lets you make driving mistakes in the comfort of your home and with no great cost. The car handling is close enough to learn from... for example, cornering in FWD vs RWD...

free to download and play (well, apart from buying the steering wheel, which you don't per se need to play the game but imho you do need to porgress very far). However, it's easy to get hooked and start spending money on cars and parts...

They've got one of those at Silverstone, I've seen it a few times now, looks great fun, might have to get some high-lift jacks and an old shopping trolley and make one myself ;-)

When it comes to ice driving though, the little experience I've had of it made it seem totally different to skidding because there's not that much you can do once you're sliding particularly on the kind of small roads that it's likely to happen on, as even at very slow speeds, the direction the vehicle goes in seems to be controlled largely by the undulations in the road surface! On an icy single-track road I used to drive regularly, one part had a raised middle that you could drive and the car would pretty much auto-correct itself, the rest of it seemed flat in the dry but when every bump causes the car to twitch suddenly seemed mountainous, but the verges meant I could keep going. I had a small bag of grit in the boot just in case, having found that it's not always that easy to get some from the fields by the side of the road.

On the way back to my current house one year there was massive icing, the A303 was clear but rammed with traffic so I tried the back roads, that was until I had a lot of trouble getting up one hill then twigged that I'd have a lot of trouble stopping myself going down hills, as would other people coming towards me and didn't fancy ending up in a little pool of bashed cars trapped in the crest between two hills ;-)

I did and it came straight trouble is it then kept on going, so the other direction was applied, came back again but over shot again repeat getting bigger each time until you run out of road... B-(

I wasn't braking so the ABS wouldn't have come in anyway. Was under engine braking though so the wheels where being "braked". So once unstuck the engine braking would slow 'em even more...

Which is why I think putting a bit of power back to the wheels would have brought it back under control, by getting the wheels to rotate at the same speed that the road is travelling under them. Once they are close they'll "land" again, you'll have grip and thus steering. Well that's the theory.

You won't have steering without traction... a rear wheel drive with a front wheel skid would be an exception of course and would just push you further round.

I was driving like I had a half full bucket of water on the bonnet, so fairly gently.

The big difference is that, in a braking skid not on ice, most of the friction between the road and tyres is still available once you unlock the wheels. Which is basically how ABS works by removing the lock up. But it still takes quite a concious decision to take your foot off the brake (in a non ABS car) when skidding towards something hard... On ice you have four fiths of bugger all friction between the tyres and surface so not an awful lot of control once sliding.

I remember once braking downhill on snow, fronts locked up, started to spin, steered into the spin, got full lock on but was still going in a straight line down the hill. Fortunately slow enough to think what the f*ck is going on, full lock not going where I should be, ah I'm braking, took foot of brake and did an instant 90 degree turn as the tyres gripped and took the car in the direction they were pointing. Managed to pull that back though but it didn't half make me jump doing that instant turn.

I'm suspecting Dave tried to get himself out of the skid but overdid it and then fish-tailed gaily into the tree. Easily descends into a brown trouser moment or worse. What can make life exceedingly interesting is patchy black ice, OK you get into the slide and correct and nothing happens so you correct some more, still nothing and the patch of ice comes to an end and your front wheels are on full lock, the wrong way, now you get grip, pirouette and head for the magnetic tree, whilst franticly searching for the bog-roll.

"Austin Shackles" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Gordon Bennett Austin, 960MB, you must be made of disk space!