Wet Driving

[Norm Peterson]

ABS on motorcycles is the best thing ever.

I'm afraid my riding days were over long before that was ever available. While I can imagine where the advantages lie, having no direct personal experience = no personal, gut-level basis for opinion. That matters.


Norm

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[Hack]

Sounds like you've never had them act when not needed - or worse, acted when doing so was the wrong thing. While the latter situations are fairly rare they do occur.

Oh yes I have had them act when not needed. Of course. And yes that is annoying (my assumption is that is what you are implying - that I've never been annoyed by the nannies).

But I have never had the nannies act in a way that endangered me or others.

Have you?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Fox-body starts out not being all that high on any cornering & handling scale and is relatively easy to "get away from you" on throttle. And when hotrodded - I'm assuming for the straight line stuff here - its directional stability and control capabilities are compromised still further.

More power and MM rear suspension / C/C plates to improve handling. And yes they were always a bit light in the rear and tail happy. And that's what I drove all year. -20 below, snow storms, rain, whatever. No - no straight line.

Chances are it was the wrong kind of car/build for the conditions you should fully expect to experience in your part of the country. A Probe would have been better for sure (until about 3 years ago we had one of that car's Mazda cousins in V6/5MT trim).

I hate driving FWD vehicles in limited traction. The front wheels are trying to do too much and when you push too much they understeer. I'd much rather fight oversteer than understeer. Just what I'm used to.

I don't think I've ever had a situation where the ability to brake only one or two of the wheels would have made any difference over braking all four. I understand this and how it works, but I just don't seem to get into such situations.

It's been rare for me too. The one situation really stands out in my mind. I was on an on-ramp coming up a hill to a corner and there was glare ice at the top of the hill. I was going too fast for the available traction - maybe 20 mph or so. The car got out of shape and I corrected but all four wheels were sliding and there was going to be no way to avoid the concrete wall. It was in the GT350 and I had it in weather mode at the time. I couldn't even tell you what the nannies did, but I was really grateful when it straightened itself out. I know for sure that hitting the brakes (all 4) wouldn't have helped.

No, it's not. And when all four tires are on that stuff the nannies are just as helpless as you are. Maybe even more so. Been there (and crashed, not quite 51 years ago).

There were no advanced nannies 51 years ago. If you aren't daily driving a vehicle built in the last 3 years you don't really know what you're talking about regarding computerized nannies in my opinion. My 2011 GT was a world behind my 2015 GT.

This is coming from straight-line Fox-body experience, right? The sort of throttle (and braking) modulation you learn over on the corner-carving side of the automotive hobby translates directly to your ability to deal with low-grip driving in general. At an absolute minimum your panic reaction starts much later, you're less tense, and more focused on doing what you need to be doing. Seems that simple to me, anyway, and it still seems to work.

I grew up driving on icy roads in an area where the roads weren't salted, tires were poor, and you had to live with low amounts of traction. I've never been to a drag strip, so no I'm not coming from a straight line background.

I do believe you might be right that if I lived on a road course instead of most of my cornering being on public roads and just a handful of trips to the road course I'm sure I'd be better at handling low traction. However, it's hard to believe that lots of experience with low traction hasn't helped me handle low traction.. Your thoughts?

And like I've said more than once and in more places than just here, if my experience was less satisfactory than it has been I might see this whole nanny-thing differently.


Norm

Makes sense to me.

Most times in the rain at least, the posted speed limits and curve advisories are good enough guidelines. Assuming that your car and particularly its tires and brakes are in good condition (if they aren't, why aren't they?).

Yeah I keep my cars in good shape and maintain them well.
Also, I do my best to avoid speeding in all conditions. I won't play the gotcha game with you, but I will say that my malfunction and the enjoyment I get out of driving performance cars involves acceleration, not absolute speed.

I used traction aids in rain mostly to help the car accelerate better. You can frown on that if you wish. I understand the limitations of what they can do for me.

For anything worse you need to be parking your impatience and driving enough slower than that.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda I know my limitations - patience is a virtue and I'm not that virtuous.

I dare you to requote this . . .
The nannies aren't there to let you keep on driving the same way you would under better conditions, so don't use them that way.
Norm

I don't do that, but I can launch and accelerate much better with the aids on.. and once in a blue moon they will save me when I mess up or conditions change rapidly.

 

[Norm Peterson]

I have never had the nannies act in a way that endangered me or others.

Have you?

Borderline yes. Having a brake applied and power cut when I really needed to be accelerating up to highway speed (the ramp curve radius tightened significantly at the end, putting me at a slower speed for the merge than should have been the case).

More power and MM rear suspension / C/C plates to improve handling. And yes they were always a bit light in the rear and tail happy.
No - no straight line.

Fair enough. But "hotrodded Fox" does have a certain connotation.

I'd much rather fight oversteer than understeer. Just what I'm used to.

Oversteer can be fun, but it's inherently unstable (and potentially worse at higher speeds once yaw damping drops off with increasing speed). I guess if you're going to play with more than just a little OS, letting something rein you in before it gets completely out of hand would be a good thing. OS on the street tends to make you tense, so I try pretty hard not to go there except as my "winter driving refresher course" - in a nearby deserted parking lot once there's a little snow on it.

There were no advanced nannies 51 years ago.

With four tires on black ice there isn't going to be a whole lot of difference whether all four wheels are trying to slow you down or only one of them is. If fewer than four wheels are braking, the retarding force is apt to be unequal side to side, which adds a new source of yaw/instability. Avoiding/mitigating this is perhaps the toughest part of the calibration of these systems.

However, it's hard to believe that lots of experience with low traction hasn't helped me handle low traction.. Your thoughts?

There is certainly value in that - my first few years of driving were in Massachusetts, all in RWD cars, mostly V8-powered, none with snow tires.

Actually, autocross might be a more useful activity than either HPDE or street experience for this purpose. Especially wet autocrossing. The speeds are lower and the maneuvers more "frantic" (for lack of a better word) and almost on top of each other at times.

... and the enjoyment I get out of driving performance cars involves acceleration, not absolute speed.

I used traction aids in rain mostly to help the car accelerate better.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda I know my limitations - patience is a virtue and I'm not that virtuous.

... but I can launch and accelerate much better with the aids on.. and once in a blue moon they will save me when I mess up or conditions change rapidly.

Not frowning, but evidently hard acceleration is still more important to you than hard cornering. And it's cornering skill that's more applicable to doing by yourself what stability control is intended to do for you.

I'm not particularly interested in absolute speed either, but speed around a corner goes to cornering acceleration, which was really where I was heading with that and which does matter here.

For me, it's always been the hard cornering taking priority over the launch and forward acceleration. I've spent a driving lifetime learning how to stay within the limits of available grip/traction by my own efforts alone - even for my more "enthusiastic" driving. I'm actually pretty happy to be able to say I've only put my '08 into wheel hop once in 9+ years where I wasn't trying pretty hard to do that on purpose (and only a couple of times more, not on a public street, where I was - and how I found out how useless my car's TC actually was). All of those episodes were in the wet.


Norm

 

[PJR202]

It's a 400hp rear wheel drive car. I just drive it the same as I do with my 236hp rear wheel drive Tacoma--avoid sudden movements, hard acceleration, back off the throttle when turning or when changing lanes if the blacktop is uneven or water has collected in the beaten path. I'm on P Zeros and I've never broken traction in rain.

There is zero reason to hammer the throttle in rain anyway unless you're specifically trying to do a rainy burnout. I used to do it in my dad's 88 Taurus all the time..haha.

 

[panhandler62]

The rain doesn't hamper cornering (not to any degree that is out of line with "it's raining - don't be a dumbass" anyway.)

The only thing I really notice is that the rear steps out pretty easily if you try to feed it before you're going straight. It's about like my 72 Camaro was. I would blame the turbo, but it will do it long before positive manifold pressure shows up. lol

It's been an interesting thread.

It brings up another question -- people keep mentioning Pirellis. My car does not have the PP (no center dash gauges is my clue -- since I bought it used I didn't get to pick the options). I have Goodyear F1s on mine.

Is that the stock tire for a car without the PP?

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