Drivers at the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in Steamboat Springs, Colo. practise controlling understeer through numerous corners with a front-wheel-drive Toyota Camry, and oversteer with an all-wheel-drive Toyota 4Runner.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
The instructor’s advice sounds simple enough.
“Driving in the winter is all about managing grip,” says Kurt Spitzner, operations manager for the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in northwest Colorado, which has been teaching drivers from around the world about snow and ice for more than 40 years.
There are three ways to lose grip, which Spitzner describes as the ABCs of driving: acceleration, braking and cornering.
“In the summertime, we have a tendency to combine those three controls because we can get away with it,” Spitzner says. “The most common thing to combine is cornering and braking. In the summertime, it works but not in the wintertime.”
When there’s snow or ice on the road, it becomes a slippery barrier between the grip of your car’s tires against the asphalt. The key is to know how to manage that reduced grip, according to Spitzner.
“All you have to do is focus on staying smooth,” he says, which requires control of your vision and speed and separating the two.
“[It’s] the art of telling your car to do one thing at a time.”
Instructors at the driving school teach how to separate accelerating, braking and cornering to improve grip.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Controlling your vision means looking up and ahead down the road as far as possible, so that you’re not surprised by a change in conditions such as curves in the road and other vehicles. You want as much reaction time as possible for anything that might come next.
”You want time to create a strategy,” Spitzner says.
Controlling your speed means slowing down if needed to better manage that upcoming curve or oncoming car. If you need to slow more quickly with your brakes, he recommends doing it in a straight line, not while trying to steer. This doesn’t necessarily mean slowing to a crawl.
“We are not a drive-slow-everywhere school,” says Spitzner. “Here in Colorado, one of the leading causes of accidents in the high country is people driving too slow, because everybody behind them gets impatient and then takes chances and makes things worse for everybody.”
Separating the controls describes the driver’s understanding of what’s going on when the car needs to alter its course, either by going around a corner or if there’s an obstacle ahead. Braking will transfer the car’s weight to the front, while acceleration transfers the weight to the rear. Tires with more weight on them have more grip, and vice-versa. This is the part that takes practice, and where driving on the Bridgestone Winter Driving School’s winter course becomes invaluable. It includes several pristine tracks across 88 acres of farmland to demonstrate its advice. Unlike schools on frozen lakes or in parking lots, the land rises and falls just as a real road often does.
Behind the wheel on one of those tracks, with an instructor beside me in the passenger seat, I remembered rule No. 1: Look where I want to go, not at where I’m actually going.
“Stop staring at what you’re about to hit and somehow your hands and your feet will get you there, or at least try,” Spitzner says. “I’m not a doctor so I don’t know why this is true, but just rolling your eyes around in your skull does not work. You have to actually turn your head, and your hands and feet will follow the eyes.”
If your car starts to skid in a turn, he explains it will either understeer or oversteer. Understeering is when it doesn’t turn enough and, if the driver tries to compensate by steering more, it will turn less.
”The best thing about understeer is you get a chance to stare at what you’re going to hit,” says Spitzner, who’s seen many of the school vehicles plow into snowbanks with their steering wheels at full lock.
“Understeer is caused by not using good vision – not looking far enough down the road or just refusing to acknowledge you need to slow down. The driver ends up using too much steering, which is also known as panic,” Spitzner says.
The winter driving school uses several pristine tracks on 88 acres of farmland.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
He also recommends drivers stay off the throttle.
“No one is powering out of an understeer … and you have to stay off the brake,” Spitzner says. “If you can just reduce a little bit of steering input to help the tires, find some grip, chances are you’re going to get something done.”
Oversteer is when the car turns too much – the back end swings out and the vehicle spins.
”The good news is the car will stay on the road, but the bad news is that it’ll be facing in the wrong direction,” Spitzner says. “The solution is to turn your head and eyes to look where you want to go, which comes naturally because your car is already turning.”
He then recommends drivers stay off the brakes, steer into the skid and apply a little throttle if necessary.
“This isn’t because you’re trying to speed up, but to transfer weight from the front tires to the rear.”
Out on one of the Bridgestone tracks, I practised controlling understeer around numerous corners with a front-wheel-drive Toyota Camry, and oversteer with an all-wheel-drive Toyota 4Runner around a sloping skid pad.
The biggest lesson I learned that day was to not use the brake and throttle to slow down or speed up the wheels, but to use them instead to move the vehicle’s weight to either back or front to increase the grip of the tires on the ice.
The instructor turned off the automatic braking system (ABS) so the Toyotas didn’t help me to stop. By doing this, I recognized that turning the steering wheel only steers the car when the tires are rolling, not when they’re locked and sliding. ABS releases and applies the brakes repeatedly when they lock to permit a small level of effective steering while the driver steps on the brake pedal.
Toward the end of the day, on one of the slipperiest and most treacherous courses I’ve experienced, I was slewing confidently in the exact direction I wanted to go – or at least mostly. Only practice helps make perfect.
The writer was a guest of Bridgestone. Content was not subject to approval.