Once upon a time in the West, men with jaws of granite and Glocks tucked down their jockey shorts developed evasive driving techniques for dealing with mobile assaults by terrorists in parts of the world where you tend not to book summer vacations.
Around the same time, some stunt boys in Hollywood were doing the same thing because it was fun and looked cool on shows like The Fall Guy, Knight Rider, and The Dukes of Hazzard. By adopting an aggressive driving style that destabilizes the car, and then bringing in measured amounts of speed, steering, and brake, they learned to make a car dance.
I’ve taught some of these skills to law enforcement operatives, Special Forces, and even James Bond himself—but whatever you call them, these moves are only legal on film sets or if you’re being shot at. In the real world, you’d only get to have a go on a closed parking lot or airfield with an instructor, but these techniques do represent the theoretical outer limits of what is possible and therefore deserve their place in a book called How to Drive. So join me, if you will, in a thought experiment: It’s your first day on the set of 2 Fast, 2 Furious 27, you’ve just been thrown the keys to a brand-new Aston Martin, and the director is about to yell, “Action!” . . .
The goal of evasive driving is to evade the threat and flee to safety. Your aim throughout is to keep moving. In an ambush, your best chance of escape is to drive through it, or spot it early enough to change your route.
In Spiderman 2 there’s a scene where the villain carves through the city with a big towing rig, literally scything through traffic. I was one of thirty cops in hot pursuit, and we had to drive through the mess “no matter what,” while preserving the cars as best we could.
The truck was turning cars into confetti, and squeezing through the maelstrom of flying debris and crashed cars was easier said than done, especially with half of New York’s Finest trying to fit through the same hole!
When that hole was too small I needed to make it bigger, while avoiding the kind of head-on collision that usually kills radiators; so I would slap the offending blockage with one of the front-quarter panels and drive through. One trick I’ve used before is to ease off the gas just before impact and then accelerate through—it helps to lift the other car out of the way and preserves your momentum. It’s still crashing, but with style.
They learned to make a car dance.
If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of actually having the ball during a game of Top Gear “Car Football,” then you can expect a visit from one crazy cat by the name of Richard Hammond. For him the ball is like a sack of catnip, and it’s best not to get in the way when he speeds toward you with “that look” in his eye.
In this situation the hand brake turn is a lifesaving solution because you can get out of the way fast by spinning the car around and heading off in the other direction. Here’s the garden-variety method:
For pulling a 180 into a parking space between two cars I would advise practicing with vehicles of the rubber-cone variety before attempting it in your driveway.
The goal is to fill the empty gap between two cars, and to do this requires alignment, timing, and control. Repeatability is the key to perfecting this move, and that is achieved by using exactly the same speed and turn of the wheel every time. Throughout the move, you need to keep your eyes fixed on the parking space.
Line up facing the car you plan to turn away from. That way, when you make your hand-brake turn, the car will naturally rotate away from the car you’re facing and rotate into the gap.
Drive straight toward the outer car and up to your set speed, then flick the car to the right, yank hard on the hand brake, and depress the clutch (or switch to neutral).
As the car spins, turn your head in time so that you never lose sight of the parking spot—this helps your hands, which are stupid, follow your eyes, which have a hotline to your brain.
A fraction before the car rotates 180 degrees, release the hand brake and straighten the steering to begin reversing. Depending on your distance from the space, you may or may not require reverse gear.
As long as you stay off the foot brake, the car should have enough momentum to carry itself backward into the space until you stop on your end mark.
The stunt version of parallel parking is the toughest trick to master, and there is no substitute for practice, practice, practice. To pull the perfect 90 you need to focus on two vital dimensions: the arc of rotation and the landing.
As with the 180, your approach speed will depend on how the car behaves on the surface. The greater the grip, the higher your speed needs to be in order to break traction and skid into the space: 25 mph is about the max.
Lining Up: Pick a start point about ten car lengths away from the parking space, offset by roughly three car widths so that you have enough room to steer a gradual arc toward the space. This gives you a longer arc along which to turn and apply the hand brake so that momentum carries the car into its spot.
The key to this is arriving so that you can aim into the gap at a perpendicular angle. The incredibly hard part to judge is when to steer toward the gap and pull the hand brake.
You need to think everything through in slow motion and remember that, as the car slides, there is a delayed reaction to your inputs.
Key Markers: You need to determine an initial pivot point around which to start rotating, and this will vary depending on your style and the grip level. Generally speaking, the pivot point can be found one car length away from the center of the parking space.
It is important that you aim toward the center so that, as the car rotates, it has equal space to fill into at both front and rear, assuming your car doesn’t have a vast overhang beyond the rear axle. Your line of sight should draw focus points on the space itself, as well as your distance from the rear bumper of the car you’re about to slide up to.
Doing It: Fix your start mark to make the process repeatable. Choose one that gives you plenty of time to get up to a set speed.
Make a few practice runs at low speed to get a feel for timing the steering and pulling the hand brake without actually committing.
Once you’re ready to give it a go, drive up parallel to the gap and make your turn. Just before the car is pointing directly at the space, pull on the hand brake and let fly toward the space.
As you enter the parking space you should sense whether the car will over- rotate and spill out of the space if the speed is a little high, or under-rotate if the car isn’t sliding on the hand brake. To correct over-rotation as it’s happening, you can ease on the foot brake. If the car isn’t sliding enough, then pull harder on the hand brake and add a little more speed next time around.
Break Out:
In the event that you succeed in breaking the world record for parallel parking into a space an inch longer than your car, you need to figure a way to get out again. You could ask someone politely to move the other cars out of the way, but that wouldn’t be very sporting.
No, what you need to do is pull the hand brake all the way up and turn the steering as far as it will go in the desired direction. Then select first gear, redline the engine, and release the clutch. With the hand brake restricting forward motion, the front tires will spin wildly and drag the car’s nose out of the space. Release the hand brake and head off to buy some new tires.
A J-turn is a reverse 180-degree spin that requires a deft hand and good coordination at each step of the move.
The key to a good J-turn is how quickly you whip the steering through the twelve o’clock position to initiate the spin, and how efficiently you unwind that steering to complete the move.
To achieve both these goals, I hold the wheel at two o’clock with my left hand and look over my right shoulder (vice versa in right-hand drive), so that I can yank it through twelve with plenty of force and apply enough lock to swivel the nose of the car. At the end of the move, it’s easy to return my hand to its original position so that I know the front wheels are pointing straight again.
Step 1. Line up: Stop the car, select reverse, and observe the view through the rear windshield to check it’s clear. There needs to be enough space to accommodate the length of the car when it spins, so you should line up in the center of that space and fix your sights on an object in the far distance to ensure that you drive straight.
Step 2. Position your whipping hand at two o’clock (looking over your shoulder through the rear screen is generally easier), or ten o’clock for a right-hand turn, and reverse quickly, so as to load the suspension, up to a minimum speed of 20 mph, and ideally around 40 mph, to ensure that the front tires will skid when you want them to.
Step 3. Whip. Once you’re up to speed, lift off the accelerator and crank the steering to the right from two o’clock to about eight o’clock and put the clutch in. The car will spin on its axis.
Step 4. Steer through. As the car’s nose makes its way past 90 degrees you should be looking through the windshield and steering the wheel through to the left. This helps the car rotate a full 180 degrees into its new direction.
Step 41/2. Gear and go. To be really slick with a manual gearbox, you need to have the clutch engaged by the time the car passes 90 degrees, before it starts going forward, so that you can calmly move the gear lever from reverse to second and drive away. Failing to do this will result in some disagreement between your transmission and the road over which way each one should be going. With an automatic you just flick the car into drive as the car rotates and peel away when you’re facing the right way.
To pull off the following maneuvers, you will need a car that allows you to turn off the traction control and stability systems—an endangered feature in these times of state intervention. It also needs to be rear-wheel-drive with a limited slip differential, or diff.
The diff connects the driven wheels together and does two jobs. In a curve, it allows the outside wheels, which have the farthest to travel, to turn faster than the inside wheels. When you accelerate, it also divides the amount of drive transmitting through them.
As the car leans into a curve, the weight bearing down on the outside tires gives them more grip than those on the inside. This makes the inner tire more prone to losing traction under acceleration, so in models with a very “open” diff, all their power slops through the wheel with the least ability to handle it. When the inside wheel spins, no power is transmitted through the other tire, and you don’t go very far.
A “locking” diff limits the speed differential between the driven tires and thereby metes out the power more evenly across them, providing better drive and accuracy. There’s only one way to know for sure . . .
The garden-variety donut is as easy as walking out of your front door, as long as you have the space and don’t mind abusing your tires. It’s easier using a manual transmission, but still possible with an automatic.
From a static position in first gear, keep the clutch fully depressed, floor the throttle, and redline the engine. Let the cacophony sing for a few seconds and don’t mind the engine, because the rev limiter will protect your pistons.
Turn the steering hard in your preferred direction and dump the clutch. “Dumping” means lifting your foot off the clutch faster than if you stepped on molten lava. The common mistake people make is to pull away slowly by easing out the clutch, which just fries the clutch plates and accelerates you forward when you want to go sideways.
When you dump the clutch pedal, the clutch plates grab hold of the engine and instantly transmit all its power to the rear tires. This overwhelms their tractive ability and they start spinning, which is good. The act of steering causes the car to pivot around its nose, and as long as you keep your right foot planted to the floorboards, you will rotate in a glorious cloud of burning rubber that will cost you around eight dollars a second.
That part was easy.
This is much harder to do and may take a while to explain, let alone master. With the basic donut all you had to do was hit the gas and turn right, or left, to make the car spin as tightly as possible. The controlled donut is all about accuracy around a specific mark, which means keeping the beast on course using some fluid hand-eye coordination.
The controlled donut is all about accuracy.
Before going any further, let’s plan some geography. On a live stage with Top Gear I used a mark that was about 5 feet, 7 inches, with chestnut-brown hair, and the ability to do standing splits, making martial arts superstar Chloé Bruce a distinctive beacon to rest my eyes on.
Backstage, behind the blackout curtains, I was mentally visualizing the arc—the precise route around which I wanted the car to travel—and agonizing those last seconds before the curtain went up in front of five thousand pairs of eyes.
The Holden Monaro with its throaty V-8 engine and locked rear differential was the perfect car for the job, and I’d wedged a coin into the hand brake button with some duct tape so that I could pull it and have it release instantly.
I must have done that sequence hundreds of times, rehearsed it thousands, but I always felt a deep sense of foreboding. My heart would pound, and my fingers would tingle from the adrenaline, because it was a dangerous sequence. I definitely recommend learning with a rubber cone rather than a human.
The curtain flew up, and a dazzling spotlight flooded the Monaro. I popped the clutch, the tires shrieked across the metal floor. I feathered the throttle to moderate the wheelspin and get some drive, then flicked into second gear and skirted the concrete retaining wall.
Chloé’s silk white ninja suit was entering my peripheral view to the right as I aimed for a mark that was one car’s width to her left, yanked the hand brake, steered right, and swung the Monaro around into its new trajectory.
The hand brake slewed the car around until it reached a yaw angle of around 45 degrees relative to Chloé. Thirty-five miles per hour of forward momentum scrubbed down to about 15 mph of lateral clockwise drift.
As the Monaro rotated, its mouth pointed perilously toward Chloé’s single leg while she wowed the crowd with her spectacular swordplay and high kicks, living up to her world record status. Had the car gripped at that moment, it would have lurched forward and knocked her down like a bowling pin. Hence the nerves.
At that point I could think about catching the slide with the steering and adding throttle, to create enough wheelspin to stop the car from gripping and continue the slide. But not too much. That was the tricky part. Knowing precisely how much of each to use, and when, takes practice.
The first catch usually involved some sweeping movements with the steering and active use of the throttle until the car took a set—when the rear has swung sideways enough that you can put the steering into opposite lock and catch it, then reduce and modulate the throttle to keep the rears spinning. At that point the car would balance, and I could trim its progress with small corrections of steering and minor adjustments to a fairly constant throttle to keep the rear tires smoking.
In order to creep the car’s nose closer to Chloe and scare the crowd, I had to make the car follow a tighter arc, which is just the same as making a sharper turn with a supermarket shopping cart. You kick the rear out wider so the nose stays put.
To ease the tail out wider, I increased the throttle to spin the rears faster and reduce their grip. At first, this made the car want to spin, so I simultaneously added a little more opposite lock to control the additional yaw before ultimately reducing to minimal counter-steering.
The result was a tighter, if busier, circle around Chloé and an unblinking fascination with the distance between my bumper and her kneecap. Too much throttle at this point and the car would spin, but too little and it would grip and move forward. Ouch.
If that wasn’t enough to think about, the grip level never stays constant in a live arena, so the rear would snap across dollops of water deposited by leaky radiators. I could cope with that; but when my talent ran dry, I had a backup plan: widening my arc.
To push the car away from Chloé, I let the Monaro drift wide. By steering left into the slide and easing off some throttle, it restored a little grip to the rears, reducing the yaw angle, and the car obeyed the direction of the wheel. Once I moved out to the left, I increased the power again to spin up the rears and restore the drift.
Step 1. Walk it. Walk the route sideways to develop your visual reference on the center mark, and rehearse the relationship between your position and the center mark. That distance and your rate of yaw dictate the handling.
Step 2. The throw. As soon as you turn right, the rear will rotate, and you allow this until the car reaches a 45-degree angle (give or take, depending on the model, subject to terms and conditions) and takes a set.
Step 3. The catch. Once the car reaches 45 degrees, you have to catch it. This is the transition from steering right to create the initial slide, to steering left to maintain a steady ship. The hard part is that the rear floats around pretty fast, and the temptation is to overcorrect with steering or spin out. The trick is to back off the throttle the moment you reach 45 so that the rears grip for just a moment as you throw in the opposite lock. Then it’s back on with the throttle to maintain the wheelspin, and let the car settle onto a knife-edge. Keep your eye on the center mark to measure the angle.
“Let the car settle onto a knife-edge.”
Step 4. The set. When you get into the sweet spot, balance the slide with small corrections of opposite lock and throttle. Your aim is to hold your yaw steady and reduce your inputs to the bare minimum. Let the car do the work.
Arc. On a wider arc you travel faster, and life is actually a little easier, because you have more time to adjust what the car is doing. The higher speed increases your lateral momentum, making it easier to hang the rear out there. If your speed drops on a wide arc, the car will grip, so you need to increase the throttle or turn more tightly. On a tighter arc, the car responds more quickly, and your inputs need to be crisp.
Steering. Steering is not an infinite resource; if you keep winding the car into a skid, it will eventually thud into the bump stops as the steering reaches the point where it can turn no more, proving troublesome when an extra claw of steering is the only thing keeping you from rotating into the boonies. Pro drifters fit exceptionally wide-angle steering to make the job easier and hold their cars super sideways, but you still need to live within your means.
Brake. In the drift universe the brake restricts forward momentum, enabling you to spin up the rear tires even more and slow the car in general. Yes, this involves left-foot braking. With your right foot busily making music, you creep your left foot onto the brake pedal. This mostly binds the front tires and transfers weight their way, which allows you to accelerate harder to really light up the rears, increase yaw, and all that good stuff.
If you have watched Top Gear then you will have seen endless footage of priceless supercars being subjected to a royal pounding—smoke billowing from the wheel arches as burning rubber churns at the asphalt to a cacophony of screeching tires and dubbed music. The car yaws perilously sideways but maintains a surprisingly predictable course through the curve, assuming the nut behind the wheel doesn’t run out of talent.
The phenomenon of “drifting” has been the stuff of Hollywood legend ever since Steve McQueen climbed aboard a Ford Mustang in Bullitt and proceeded to paint rubber across the cityscape of San Francisco.
If you mastered the donut, then you’re ready to drift, because you’ve just been doing it. The easiest way to get started is to link two donuts together to form a figure 8, but before we get into that, here’s some background.
Drifting as a technique developed in rallying during the 1960s after some Scandinavian drivers drank a lot of vodka in the Jacuzzi. They spoke in short sentences or not at all, and shared their frustration with traditional methods of tackling curves that were painfully inadequate on snow and ice. Their epiphany appeared at the bottom of a shot glass: “Vee do it sidevays!”
The conventional style of navigating a curve as quickly as possible had always been to brake in a straight line, get off the brakes, and steer in the direction of the turn. The trouble with ice was that the tires couldn’t offer enough traction to overcome the car’s forward momentum. The fronts just washed out at low speed, and you missed the curve. There lay the secret.
The Vikings worked out a way to make momentum work for them, and it was as easy, in theory, as swinging an ax. They arrived at a left-hander with the car skidding and pointing in the opposite direction to the curve, the prompt for most people to abandon ship. Then they steered hard left, effectively overcorrecting the slide (remember page 213 on car control, the Tank Slapper), and the car’s tail swished across to the other side with enough lateral momentum to propel the whole ordeal around the curve. With the centrifugal forces that previously worked against them during the entry phase averted, temporarily, the car entered the curve at higher speed. Now the problem was keeping it there.
The head of the swinging ax was loose, to say the least. To keep it from falling off and embedding itself deep inside a Swedish pine, the Vikings had to counter the force running down the length of the car’s body. The answer to that lay beneath their right foot, and by nailing the throttle to the rug it produced enough driving force to counter and control the pull of gravity. It also accelerated them out of the curve faster than the conventional cornering method.
Tommi Mäkinen, an early pioneer of the “Scandinavian flick” (see following), explained that perfecting this took “at least two years, and many, many cars.”
By skidding sideways under braking in the opposite direction to the curve, the tires dig into the surface and slow the car more effectively until you reach the turning point; then you swing it toward the curve and use the pendulum effect to catapult you around. Assuming that your face isn’t already embedded in a mountain, the car points toward the curve, enabling early acceleration.
This style of driving would dominate world rally competition for years to come. In Japan it developed a cult status, as the heroes hammering the treacherous mountain pass at Touge (toe-geh) began tuning their cars to exaggerate the sideways style way beyond anything performance-related. It was all about style.
Here are the various techniques for initiating a drift. Each scenario creates an abrupt loss of traction to the rears, and you have to be incredibly fast with the steering to control it. So fast, in fact, that there are times when it’s better to let go of the steering to allow it to spin through your fingers and catch it again when you have the correct steering angle.
As you approach the curve, pull the hand brake to lock the rears, steer toward the curve, and throw the car into a drift. Once it’s sliding, you fling the wheel over and drive the car on the throttle.
You may remember my emphasis on smooth clutching to avoid upsetting the car. Well, being a meathead is a bonus for drifting. There are two ways to use it.
As you approach the curve, you drop a gear and instead of rev matching or gently releasing the clutch pedal, you deliberately allow the revs to drop, and pop the clutch just as you steer in. The sudden take-up of engine braking puts enough shock through the rear axle to break traction and pitch the car sideways as you steer. This technique can be unreliable, and you lose speed.
The clutch-kick is the best way to get the show on the road. Rather than letting engine braking do the work, you clutch in and accelerate to boost engine revs. With your foot hard on the gas, you steer in, pop the clutch, and the sudden acceleration creates enough wheelspin to send you sideways.
The clutch-kick is used multiple times throughout the turn to maintain wheelspin and yaw angle. You keep the throttle pinned and rapidly kick the clutch in and out as many times as you need to trim the drift.
If it’s got an engine, it can drift. Everything in the book up to this point has been about managing weight transfer to produce maximum stability and grip. Now the objective is to disturb the weight so that it overcomes rear traction, and the “flick” is the primary tool in the drift box of tricks.
You approach the curve with slightly too much speed for a conventional entry, breathe on the brake to shift weight off the rears onto the front tires, and then initiate a pendulum turn. That is, you steer toward the outside of the curve and then rapidly twitch it the other way. The rampant weight transfer causes the rear to skid, and then you stamp on the gas to hold it sideways.
So you’re sideways . . . now what?
Once you’ve initiated the drift, your attention needs to be drawn to your trajectory. This is very much a seat-of-the-pants vibe and tied to the same technique you deployed in the donut to control your arc.
Having made it through one curve without biting the dust, the next goal is to link two curves together. It requires the most careful execution, and this is where the figure 8 comes in.
The figure 8 is really a pair of opposing donuts with a switchback in the middle. It’s the best way to develop a feel, at comparatively low speed, for how the car will cope with a sudden switch of direction while sliding.
The figure 8 is really a pair of opposing donuts with a switchback in the middle.
We call this switch the transition turn, and it is the hardest part to control, as well as the most satisfying.
As you circle the first donut in a clockwise direction, you select a pivot point around which to switch directions and point yourself toward a new arc that takes you counterclockwise around the second donut.
You widen your arc out of the initial donut, and on approaching that pivot point you create a moment of grip in the rears by overcorrecting the slide with additional counter-steering (assuming you have any left!) and by releasing some throttle.
The car obeys the steering, and suddenly the tail swishes across the other way. All the counter-steering has to be passed into the opposite direction in order to catch this new slide and balance your new trajectory.
Pro drifters are judged by their angle of attack, speed, and the aggression of their transition from one direction to the other as they link two curves. Ideally, you anticipate the turn so that you have enough space and time to really whip the rear across, jump back on the gas, and be lined up nicely for the next curve.
With the engine hammering off the rev limiter and your fists banging the wheel into the bump stops, you couldn’t be any more sideways if you tried. You release some gas, and the tail twitches across faster than an Exocet missile.
You spin the wheel like an LP record to catch the opposing slide. It naturally finds its home for the new angle, and you vaporize the scene with smoke as you carve away into the horizon.
This is really making fun of an ordeal that catches so many people out on the road: the tank slapper. And if you can learn to handle this, there’s really not much left to teach you.
I guess the only part I left out about drifting is the tandem drift: two cars battling door-handle-to-door-handle to see which can hold it the most sideways for the longest and at the highest speed. It’s a messy business, and if you spin, you lose; so maybe it’s not the best way to end the book. But then again . . .
