So you like snow driving, rallycrossing, or just oodles of oversteer — front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or all wheel drive, have I got something for you.

If you’ve been practicing simple oversteer in the snow for a while, you’re probably ready to graduate to more complicated techniques. A pendulum turn is a technique for rotating a car quickly through a hairpin so that you can power out of the corner as quickly as possible. All three drive types will start a pendulum the same way (more on special FWD, RWD, and AWD tricks later):

• Pick an area with a lot of room and a consistent snow-covered surface
• Begin by developing some speed — at least 20-30mph
• To pendulum, lift off the throttle or start braking lightly in a straight line to load up the front tires and unload the rears
• Turn the wheel slightly to the right. If you are slowing correctly and have enough forward speed this should result in a little oversteer
• Countersteer left to keep the nose of the car traveling in the original direction as the tail swings out
• As the car stops rotating to the right, turn the wheel a bit further to the left, still slowing
• If you executed this correctly and carried enough momentum, the car will snap around to the left (try for 180 degrees)
• Apply power and accelerate away in the direction you came from

This will almost certainly take some practice. Different drive types have different advantages in this maneuver:

• RWD is very easy to “cheat” and keep the oversteer going once the turn is started
• FWD allows near-instant recovery, often in less than one full swing. Steer in the direction of travel (countersteer) and apply full throttle as the nose straightens to keep the car from swinging through the center and stop or retard the pendulum.
• AWD is useful to maintain oversteer like RWD, or to recover like FWD, but does not offer either trait as strongly. Very useful for powering out the other side of a corner when FWD or RWD don’t have much traction to accelerate.
• FWD is recoverable up to very high angles (approaching 90deg to direction of travel with relative ease) — apply throttle when the steering is near lock to start reining-in excessive oversteer. For a fun variation, lift from the throttle as the car centers and let the momentum you added “shotgun” the pendulum through the center.

If you want to see what a sustained pendulum looks like, check out an old movie of ours for a bad example (better video to come), or the arab drifting videos.

Why it works:

An oversteering car that is being countersteered has a restoring force being applied to the rear wheels, and no lateral force applied to the front wheels. When the car stops rotating in one direction, the restoring force wants to push the rear wheels back in line with the direction of travel. If the car’s speed is relatively high and the slip angle is large, this restoring force is large and will give the car great angular momentum in the direction opposite the original oversteer rotation. “Car control” is the practice of learning to neutralize this restoring force and angular momentum with as little drama as possible, while a pendulum turn is the skill of maximizing the angular momentum to make a very abrupt turn (eventually within a precisely confined area).

Technorati : driving technique, performance driving, race driving, rally driving