Avoiding the Spin Cycle

Fans of racing series featuring front-wheel-drive cars often observe a strange phenomenon—cars bump together during close racing, sending one into what seems certain to be the spin cycle. But suddenly, the spinner's rotation stops before the car goes beyond perpendicular to race direction—a point far beyond any hope of recovery for a rear-drive car. Then the car whips back to the correct heading and resumes the fray, likely with the intention of allowing the instigator to enjoy the same maneuver.

Observe Closely
Only the extremely observant get a hint as to how this might happen: smoke boiling off only the front tires.


Here's the secret of the driver's prestidigitation: when a rear-tire slide (called "oversteer" by road racers and "loose" by oval trackers) can't be corrected by the usual opposite-lock steering, the pilot of a FWD racecar goes to wide-open throttle. This reduces the traction of the front tires to virtually nothing. With the rear tires now possessing more grip than the fronts, the car snaps back to its original heading.

Traction Factor
The reason for the near-spin in the first place was that the front tires had far more traction than the rears, thanks to the kick in the rear quarter panel by the competition. Sometimes, a rear-tire slide can be arrested by following the advice in your state's Driver's License Manual: turn in the direction of the skid. Such counter-steering is a racer's natural reaction to a sliding tail. But, often, counter-steering alone cannot adequately reduce the front-to-rear grip proportion to a controllable level.


In a powerful front-drive racecar, slamming the gas to the floor is even more effective than counter-steering: spinning tires have little grip in comparison to rolling tires. With the rolling rear tires possessing far more grip than the spinning fronts, the car has little choice but to return to its original heading. It's a near-opposite of an "E-brake" turn, where the parking brake locks the rear tires, causing the car to spin 180 degrees. Pressing the accelerator also transfers weight from front to rear and, thus, increases rear traction.