Most people will naturally take evasive action when they begin to spin, or to avoid an accident. But after these efforts have failed, most people simply give up and let the car take them for a ride. This tendency is extremely dangerous, and can cause far more damage and injury than the initial inicident. The golden rule is that you MUST remember is that YOU ARE NOT DONE DRIVING UNTIL YOUR CAR HAS COME TO A COMPLETE STOP. Read that golden rule again. Once it sinks in, then we can move on.

The idea behind the golden rule is that 1) your car can continue to hit things until your car is no longer in motion, and 2) you will always have some input you can do to try and avoid hitting things, even while spinning. I’ll tell you a few anecdotes to drive this point home.

The Wayward Minivan Incident
A couple of summers ago, I saw an accident in my home town. There was an intersection with a delayed green, and someone making a left turned after the other direction got a green. A minivan going straight hit the turning car. This accident stands out for me not because of what happened before the accident, but because of what happened after the accident. The minivan was probably going 15 mph when it struck the car. The impact was pretty mundane by accident standards, and most of the minivan’s energy and forward momentum dissipated when the cars hit. But after the impact, the minivan continued rolling through the intersection at 2 mph until it bumped into the curb on the far side of the intersection. The impact was definitely not hard enough to take out the braking system, and the driver was not left unconcious. This means that after the initial impact, the driver stopped driving. Fortunately, there was no additional casualty as a result, but things could easily have been different. What if a child was standing in road? What if there was no curb? What if the edge of the road was a cliff? All these things could have become catastrophic very fast, all because the minivan driver gave up instead of hitting the brake pedal.

While this example is a bit extreme, it nonetheless drives home the golden rule mentioned above. The same thing applies when you spin, even if exactly what you should do is less clear than with the minivan. Lets take a look at a spin I had at Lime Rock:

I’ve gone over the details of what happened previously, but what I want to point out now is that I drove off the track onto the grass after recovering from my 360 degree spin. Let the record show that I easily could have stayed on the track and continued driving - the spin bled off enough speed and I was more or less on Line to make the right hand turn. The reason I chose to drive off the track was because I knew that there was a Corvette right behind me. You can see it pretty clearly in the video when I’m facing 180 degrees the wrong way. I had no idea how fast the Corvette was going or what its reaction would be, so I made the decision to get out of its way. I would much rather drive of of the track than get rear ended or cause a chain of accidents behind me.

All of this goes to show the need to be vigilant of your surroundings at ALL times, and to continue driving until you have come to a stop in a safe place.