Screeech!
That was the sound of me and Daz going round Rockingham on Saturday.
Thankfully we were on a skidpan, not on the main track so those kinds of
noises are to be expected! The day was an ‘experience’ gift from the parents for Christmas and we finally got round to doing it. On the front of the gift box it shows a fairly old Ford Sierra sliding round on a great big square of tarmac, so it was quite a surprise when we got a letter each in the post saying that we’d be in a BMW 320!
Yes this motor goes very well, especially round bends! It goes round like mine never would. I don’t know if it’s because the BMW is rear wheel drive whereas mine is front, or because the BMW is a better car or simply because it’s newer.
The traction was controlled with a rig on the outside of the car that hydraulically lift the front or rear of the car. This simulates snow, ice, rain etc and is all controlled from a keypad in the front of the car. The instructor can change the grip at the front and rear independently from 0 (normal) to 10 (ice).
To begin with the instructor took the car round the circuit and showed us the sorts of thing we’d be doing. I use the word ‘circuit’ quite loosely. It was basically a massive square of tarmac with 4 or 5 cones down middle as a slalom and cones arranged in a number of ’roundabouts’ no either side. So long as the way is clear you can go where you like as quick as you like.
Needless to say the instructor gave us quite a ride round the track showing us under, overseer, all-wheel skids and different recovery techniques. We had 2 goes each round the track for a good while, trying out all the different traction modes and slinging the car round the bends. Setting the grip low at the back makes the car over-steer, in other words the car turns in towards the bend you’re going round and if you don’t steer the other way pretty quick, you’ll end up facing the wrong way and going backwards! (Like we did a few times!) The oversteer mode is great fun, whereas understeer is not so much.
Understeer is the opposite of oversteer (who’d have guessed?) and means that the car wants to keep going in a straight line as you go round the bend. The result is the car doesn’t corner as sharp as you’d like and you have to take your foot off the gas to come out of the slide. If this happened in real life then you could quite easily end up on the kerb.
Using the fancy controls the instructor could set the grip so that you’d understeer going into the bend but then oversteer as soon as you left off the gas, something he called ‘hot hatch mode’ referring in particular to the handling of the infamous Peugeot 205 GTi. He also tried to throw us off by changing the grip before each bend or even during the corner or in the
slaloms. Sneaky bugger!
A good day was had by all, even the slightly damp (it rained) spectators.
