Yahoo Autos An Empty Snow-Covered Parking Lot Is the Best Place to Master Winter Driving—Just Don't Do What I Did
Here in the North, about halfway between the equator and the North Pole, there are two main ways for young drivers to learn car control. One of them is technically illegal, which is very much like regular ol' illegal. And the other ends with your buddy Jesse helping you push your crap-can Mustang out of someone's once-lovely shrubbery in the middle of a frigid winter night. This second option is also not entirely legal, it being both reckless and dunderheaded. It also involves the destruction of someone else's property, your reputation, and Jesse's shoes.
Let us first examine the second of these methods. Here's the scene: It's a moonless January night. You're 16 and driving down a deserted ice-covered side street with Jesse in the passenger's seat. You have a rear-wheel-drive jalopy old enough to have exactly zero driver-assist systems. Stability control? Pfft! It doesn't even have a matching set of tread-bearing tires. A perfect set of circumstances, thinks the adolescent mind, to impress your friend with your natural driving skills. So, you say, "Check this out." Then you flick the steering wheel left, poke the throttle pedal, and let the rear kick out. Fun. Then a quick countersteer, and . . . oh, dang, that was too much, you realize as the rear whips left. A series of increasingly desperate overcorrections follows. How many, you have no idea. You know only that you've been winding and unwinding the steering wheel furiously for what seems like an inordinately long time. You're starting to taste the panic in the back of your mouth now. It's not just that you're putting in too much steering lock or that you're doing so too late. After a couple of pendulum cycles of the rear end, you're entirely out of sync with the car. You are crashing. You just don't know it yet. There is no sound. None from the tires. None from the neighborhood. None even from Jesse. The impact with the curb feels like a seismic event. Okay, who replaced the Mustang's rear suspension with billets of tungsten?! The backward slide cuts deep grooves through the lawn's snow blanket and the car comes to rest against a formal hedge. That impact is gentler, although the bush might have a different view of it.
Now technically, the above scenario is a lesson in car control. But it's more in the Scared Straight! mold of learnin'. Effective perhaps, but only as a deterrent against a narrow set of regrettable behaviors.
Believe it or not, there is a better place than a residential street for practicing your car-control chops. One with a much lower chance of arrest, injury, property damage, and humiliation. And it's not just one spot. There are many spots scattered all over the country. Why, I'm not 20 feet from one as I write this. I speak here of the cold crucible of car control, the dojo of drifting, the Bob Bondurant School of Bemidji. I speak, of course, of the snow-covered parking lot.
As compensation for suffering the indignities of winter, northerners are granted access to this field of pure, fluffy joy. For a freshly minted driver of the North, encountering an empty parking lot overlaid with snow is like Augustus Gloop stumbling into a field covered in marshmallow fluff. It is an invitation to indulge.
Word of warning: Most of the parking lots you will have access to are also open to other members of the public. In Michigan, section 257.626b of the vehicle code notes that anyone operating a vehicle in such a location (or on a frozen public lake, stream, or pond) "in a careless or negligent manner . . . is responsible for a civil infraction." Do so with "wantonness or recklessness" and things will apparently get even worse for you. And the thing about snow is that it has a memory. When the cops arrive, lying won't do you much good because you'll be sitting in your car on what should be a uniformly smooth surface that is instead laced with curlicues of fresh ruts. The still-soft car boogers will be dripping from behind your wheels.
But where else can a young driver learn at-limit handling with such relative safety and civic responsibility? This is the ultimate egalitarian driving school. You need only a vehicle. And it needn't be a fast one or a powerful one or a cool one. An old Monte Carlo will do. Or a rusty F-150. Or even a Civic. Try whatever you like, within certain constraints of sanity. Slam on the brakes to see what happens. Do donuts until you lose your doughnuts. Try to balance the car's front and rear ends in a controlled drift, steering with the throttle.
It's the stuff that car magazines are always going on about-balance at the limit, lift-throttle oversteer, etc. All the potentially disastrous stuff that could happen on the open road. And the appropriate reactions to emergencies are not instinctual; they're learned behaviors. Actions behind the wheel have consequences. It's best to have a keen sense of the inputs and outcomes. And on a snow-covered parking lot, the lessons occur at speeds where the consequences are almost nil.
That it is pee-your-pants hilarious fun even for an experienced driver is entirely beside the point. Just be careful in deep snow of those concrete parking logs. They are silent but deadly.
From the December 2018 issue
('You Might Also Like',)
