Seen many videos of fast cars (mustangs especially lol) accelerating in a straight line and then losing control and going into the curb/crowd. What would cause it to do that when the wheels are just pointed straight ahead?
How does one prevent or control this?
In: Engineering
Answering “why” this happens is actually pretty straight forward.
A spinning/sliding tire has significantly less grip than one that isn’t spinning/sliding. When doing something like a burnout, the tires are spinning, there’s much less grip influencing the direction of the car.
The spinning tires always want to be in front. No problem with a FWD car as it basically just self-centers, but in a RWD car, it means the car wants to spin around. A skilled driver can keep that spin from happening by steering into it in a controlled slide.
Mustangs are famous for doing burnouts with ease, but then the automatic transmission decides it’s time to shift. That shift causes a loss of power, a loss of spinning, and the grip suddenly being regained. The controlled slide is lost, the car shoots off in whatever direction it’s pointing.
Then, when the next gear engages, the tires break loose again. The car now has inertia from grip, but no grip to counteract it, so it’s extremely difficult to keep under control. This is why you can so often hear the gear shift occur in those videos right before the loss of control.
Preventing this is easy, just don’t do burnouts in automatic mode.
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