I haven’t driven my 5 in the winter before. Recently a couple of times I felt the back end slip away on a corner or roadabout and it was a little bit scary trying to correct it. I don’t feel my driving style has suddenly become more aggresive, ergo it’s very likely the road conditions.
I welcome any practical advice on adapting to winter conditions.
If you’re used to driving a front wheel drive car you will have to alter your style of driving.
When exiting a corner or roundabout feed the power back in smoothly and build the speed up.
Do not ‘floor it’ as you can in a front wheel drive.
Some months ago I was following a Ford Fiesta at a fair lick. We both aggressively accelerated away form a left hand corner.
He disappeared down the road, I did an impersonation of a snake and collided with the curb.
Four new wheels (couldn’t match the good pair), front and back wishbones replaced and a front wheel hub replaced.
About a grand!! and I was brought up driving rear wheel drive cars.
Big lesson learned
Take it easy in the damp and wet.
It’s all down to car control and general balance.
The biggest culprit when it comes to finite car control is holding the steering wheel far too tightly as tight muscles simply don’t give you the all important feel or speed of reaction.
It is just the same when playing sports such as golf or tennis, grip the club or racket very tightly and no one will ever be able to impart either full power or more importantly have the feel of what the club or racket head is doing!
As Dipstick so rightly says, feed the power in gently and let your feet float across the pedals as it is exactly the same with your feet as it is with your hands, go stamping around on the pedals and you will never go anywhere very fast.
Personally speaking, I don’t like FWD cars, most especially those with a lot of power as for me anyway, when driving them very fast at 9 or 10 tenths, they simply don’t flow whereas in a good, well set up, well balanced RWD when driven very smoothly and with total feel, my christ can you cover the ground rapidly no matter what the condition of the road surface is.
Undoubtedly rwd is far more fun but for many (who have been brought up on a diet of fwd ) a sliding rwd car is far harder to control . Understeer is dealt with almost subliminally , even by a new driver, simply by applying a little more lock, and unless you are in the habit of driving stuff like 205GTis and coming off the gas mid bend , oversteer isn’t too common in fwd cars. Oversteer is very different, as most rwd cars end up doing it in extremis and it can feel counter intuitive to wind lock off . Best thing is to find a deserted snowy car park and explore handling and control.
I rarely play silly buggers on roundabouts, especially if they are near petrol stations - I have been caught out more than a few times by spilled diesel.
Diesel spill on roadabouts is common, just like driving on black ice, and summer tyres can be a factor. If the road is wet just don’t trust it. In winter I tend to go a lot slower round corners and roundabouts.
Having driven (mostly) RWD for over 4 decades, for me it has always been my personal default button to never ever bang in power until the car is either straight, or well on it’s way to be so.
Slow in, feather the power, wait till the wheel is dead centre, off you go.
Unless, you are intent on a bit of “fun” oppo locking preferably with no passenger, and there is no other vehicle near you.
That’s been my prescription with both our 5’s over 10 years…still here to tell the tale.
What would be great fun, is a track tuition day. You can let it all hang out under instruction…brilliant.
But to be fair, I’ve had a few interesting encounters over the years with dumped diesel…serves as a wake up call!
Maybe you (OP) are just going too fast for the road conditions and or your tyres are crap.
You don’t say what tyres you have fitted, that would be my first concern if the above (too fast) doesn’t apply.
Thanks, that’s very useful feedback. I think the key issue here is my other car (and all before it) are fwd. So yes, the 5 is my first rwd… and with lsd. Having acquired it in the spring and only doing dry day driving I think I’ve developed a false sense of security for it’s fantastic handling.
I am now driving it on ‘dry’ winter days (no rain), but sometimes with that damp sheen on the road, and I suspect that is the key factor in all of this. My fwd Mondeo does not act much differently in summer or winter, but in fairness I don’t drive it to utilise the traction like the 5. Also if it does start to slip on corners you don’t get the snake/weave effect that the 5 delivers.
Incidentally the tyres on my 5 are all Michelin with plenty of tread and not too old. So I suspect this boils down to adapting my driving to a summer and winter mode iro the 5.
If we ever end up with any snow down here in Surrey, I’ll try to find a desserted supermarket car park and really get a better feel for how to handle the 5 if and when this rear end slipping occurs again.
It’s not 'if ’ but ‘when’. If I am mistaken though - you’ve bought the wrong car …
I’m afraid I don’t generally support the outlook that there’s a ‘wrong thing’ for anyone. I think people just need to learn, which was the sole purpose of my original post.
I do hope you’re right about the snow though, the child in me lives on
“I’ll try to find a desserted supermarket car park and really get a better feel for how to handle the 5 if and when this rear end slipping occurs again.”
Someone’s dropped a big pot of yoghurt in our local Tescos car park, if that’s any help…
Yes, RWD needs a different technique to FWD. FWD is so much easier in poor grip conditions, but maybe less rewarding on predictable surfaces.
I grew up on RWD cars and within a few months of passing my test realised that it was quicker to drift my Mum’s knacked old Morris Minor with its cross-ply remoulds around sharp bends than to gently slow down (useless brakes), turn and painfully accelerate (no power).
Later in my Mk2 Zodiac the roundabouts along the A40 out of London (late 1960s and de-restricted) were ideal for great fun; twitch it into a drift going in, flip it into the other drift to get round, back into the third drift on exit. I was doing it without even realising, but my mate trying to keep up behind in his PADX Cresta was amazed at how much the back of my car was moving sideways. If there wasn’t any other traffic we never needed to drop below 60.
However SWMBO learnt to drive in her woody Mini traveller, and a few months later she could not understand why on one icy morning all the other (RWD) cars around her were sliding sideways into the kerb and failing to climb the gentle hill on her way to work. Of course the Mini had skinny front tyres with all the weight on them and no power to spin the wheels, so it was ideal for the conditions with a novice driver.
For @Noddy Dog and his relative inexperience of driving a RWD car, most especially as it is in a light and relatively powerful car then one of the factors which will be working against him is the limited slip differential that is fitted.
Yes an LSD is utterly brilliant once you have become accustomed to giving it with a fair dollop of welly around the twisty stuff, because of course they result in all of the power being transmitted to the ground via both drive wheels whereas without one, too much welly/grunt being applied then all that will happen is the inside/un-weighted wheel will simply spin off the power.
As for some of the comments made about the ease of driving a FWD, most especially when it starts to understeer then yes up to a certain point simply winding on a bit more lock will work, but when you get to the limit of tyre grip more lock will simply result in more slip until all steering control is lost!
In well over 1,500,000 miles of mostly fast road and totally accident free driving I have always felt in far more comfortable control in decent RWD cars than I ever did in FWD’s, however the one aspect that I hate about my current Beemer is the automatic traction control because for the first time in my very long driving career I simply don’t feel in total control of the car.
The above comments are made making full allowance of my competition driving past in cars as diverse as various engine sizes of 1960’s Mini Cooper S’s and numerous types of Escorts and the occasional outing in Porkie 911’s.
I was going to comment on this too. All the things we try to coach out of drivers. If you are understeering, you are already effectively too fast for the radius you are trying to turn, adding more lock won’t make it better. It is the “oh ****” lift that the driver will do without realising that is helping in this. Of course, the weight is going the wrong way in RWD.
One of the very biggest problems we have these days is cars have become very competent at things and isolate drivers and so many, many drivers cannot read (or feel) the signals that the tyres is getting near the limit of grip. There are also plenty of non progressive tyres out there that give very little indication they are about to let go. The final component in this is that because drivers don’t get to practice, when it does happen, a great number don’t react until it is too late, don’t correct enough or simply just freeze.
R3 Rockingham, well worth the trip wherever you are in the country and one of only 2 kick plates in the UK.
Well, at least it’s added a certain “culture” to your area!
Yes, it’s plain to see. Or it might be strawberry…
Btw, I was only joking.
Deserted = no-one there.
Desserted = covered in dessert?
But back to the topic in question.
I always smile to myself when people talk about rear wheel drive giving inferior grip and handling. I occasionally take part in Classic Trials and have built a car for the purpose. There are 8 classes for cars, 1 being front wheel drive, 8 being anything goes specials. The higher the class number, the more capable the car is meant to be at climbing hills. Front wheel drive isn’t actually so good once the hill gets steeper.
My car is rear wheel drive and competes in Class 7, the group for the most capable “non specials”. It runs on 16 x 5.25 cross ply tyres. It has the same ground clearance as a Land Rover and has been known to out climb them in slippery conditions. We’re not allowed limited slip differentials, btw.
And a bloody enormous athletic person as a passenger leaping all over the place!!
Do you do the Land End?
No, but will do it one day, probably once I’ve stopped work.