I just finished my car control course. It starts in a classroom and the instructor talks about understeer and oversteer and what you should do. Everyone then goes outside and breaks into groups for the skidcars, which are Camrys mounted on a steel frame with pneumatics at each corner. I was with a UO student who had once spun his car and has several speeding tickets, so his family "encouraged" him to come to this, and a high school kid who had an accident involving a mailbox and some trees and ended up needed two brain surgeries. So I apparently get points for being proactive.
The instructor first set up the car so it would understeer at 15 mph and we all had some practice doing figure 8's with that to see how steering less can get you to steer more. Then the car was set up for oversteer. I was the first in the series to go and I spun the car several times before I could get it to go around a corner at all. We did some figure 8's like that, then widened up the driving area to add some different corners, and then took the widened course in the opposite direction. By the end of the day we were all doing pretty good. The instructor even asked me if I was sandbagging at one point, but that just made me start spinning again. Overall I think it was a worthwhile experience.
Now I'm going to go play Midnight Club Los Angeles and do the opposite of everything I've learned today.
1 comment:
sounds like a very interesting class. Did they have treats when you finished? Sardines maybe?
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