What to do when you hit the skids

I came here to learn how to chase my tail.

If you are lucky, that is what you wind up doing when the back end of your car goes into a seemingly uncontrollable skid. You chase the car’s tail end. If the tail swings right, you turn right on the steering wheel into the direction of the skid. If the car’s tail swings left, you turn left on the steering wheel into the direction of the skid.

It sounds so simple, so easy. And you would think that after driving an average of 38,000 miles a year, after driving all sorts of cars and trucks around the world and taking numerous driving courses from numerous experts -- you’d think I could do that.

You’d better think again.

Maybe I’m just a slow learner. If so, I had lots of company here recently in the advanced car-control clinic at the BMW Performance Center Driving School, and at Michelin Tire Corp.’s Proving Grounds in nearby Laurens, S.C.

BMW driving instructors Bill Conger, Jim Davis, Paul Mazzacane and Matt Mullins asked myself and some other drivers to go unreasonably fast on slippery skid pads until we lost control of our BMW M3 and M5 sports cars.

Those of you familiar with the advanced vehicle-control technology in M-Series cars may ask: “How can you possibly lose control of a car equipped with traction and dynamic stability control, both of which are designed to keep the car going in the driver’s intended direction under the most trying circumstances?”

The answer is simple: “Very easily, especially if your instructors ask you to turn those systems off.”

In fact, although it takes a bit more effort, you can lose control of a car with all of those skid-resistance systems turned on. “No one has yet invented anything that can overcome the laws of physics,” Mazzacane said. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you push a car aggressively, it will turn on you aggressively.”

And then he asked me to try to defy the laws of physics on those skid pads to get a visceral understanding of what he was saying.

It is amazing how fast your luck can turn when you are being stupid. At the biggest skid pad, the one at the Michelin Proving Grounds, I hit the track in an M5 in third gear. “Pick up some speed,” Mazzacane said. “Yes, sir,” I said to myself. “I like this.” I went faster. “Pick up more speed,” Mazzacane suggested, and I willingly complied.

Suddenly, the front end of the M5 felt as if it were lifting, as if it were no longer there. I remembered one of the instructors saying something about “understeer” in the earlier classroom instruction. “Understeer” occurs when the front end of the car skids out of control. I was supposed to be out there inducing “oversteer,” loss of control of the back end, not understeer.

I just panicked and did absolutely nothing. The car went haywire, spun all over the place. Mazzacane just looked at me.

“What did we tell you about understeer?” he asked in the manner of a teacher addressing an errant student. “What did we say was the easiest way to correct understeer?”

“Decelerate,” I answered, feeling much the fool.

“How?” Mazzacane asked.

“By braking,” I said.

“No! No! No!” he said. “You don’t slam on the brakes in that situation. That’s too much weight transfer, which means you just upset the car more. You were going too fast. You lost control of the front end. Correct by lifting your foot off the accelerator, or gently modulating the brakes, and steering back on course. Got that?”

And then he asked me to go too fast for conditions again. This time, I lost control of the back end -- oversteer -- and swung completely off the track. I actually made the same mistake with the same result many times.

“Your problem,” said an exasperated Mazzacane, “is that you are thinking too much. You are thinking more than you are looking where you are going. As soon as you lose control of the back end, you start looking everywhere except where you want to go, where you should be going. That could be tragic, because you always run into what you are looking at,” he said.

Then he gave me a possibly lifesaving hint. At least I was able to correct oversteer skidding after he said it:

“You know what all of this ‘turn into the skid’ stuff really means?” Mazzacane asked. “It simply means that you keep looking where you originally intended to go, no matter what happens, and you keep trying to steer into that direction, which means you’re effectively countering the skid. Try that, and stop looking at the grass when you start skidding, because that’s why you keep winding up in the grass. That grass could be a pole, and that wouldn’t be too good, would it?”

I took Mazzacane’s suggestion. It worked.