Well it was not perfect but powersliding progress was made. I had a blast trying to teach the Wife how to control the car over the limit and as you can tell she had a blast as well.
Well it was not perfect but powersliding progress was made. I had a blast trying to teach the Wife how to control the car over the limit and as you can tell she had a blast as well.
Over coming her fear is the hard part. She seems to be more comfortable towards the end of the video. I learned those skills in a snowy parking lot with a 1963 ford falcon and had a BLAST.As was mentioned, she is probably hooked.
My wife flips out on my every time I drive anywhere in the snow because I do that around every corner. If there are no other cars around I'll throw a nice wide-angle donut or two into the middle of an intersection every now and again... pull the hand brake to throw/catch on on-ramps. Generally just amuse myself. It always gets me an earful if she rides shotgun.
Last week she took out a row of mailboxes coming home from work in a fresh 5" snowfall because "I don't know - it just wouldn't steer then it went around backwards". Kudos to you for having a woman who probably won't need a new hood, headlamp housing, fender, mirror, and driver's door as soon as it's warm enough for me to go scavenge the pick-n-pulls.
Yeah SWMBO put a nice dent in her fender from the neighbors mailbox post. "I hit the brakes and it just went straight and wouldn't stop". This was a couple weeks ago right after our first real snow and then temps below zero for a couple of days.
In reply to moparman76_69:
Mine cut the 4x4 wood post holding one end of the row clean off using the left front corner as a battering ram. I also get to pay for them to get new mailboxes. The only ray of sunshine here at all is that the airbags didn't go off so it's just bolt-on stuff I can get at the wreckers.
Yeah I was lucky the car took more damage than the mailbox. She said the box popped off the post and did a flip. I've been begging her to replace the car for the last 2 years because general lack od maintenance from before I was involved had caused its condition to go downhill quickly.
Someone should start a "letting the ladies slide" type of class. The beautiful play on words here is if your wife attends said class and then smashes mailboxes, you can "let it slide" because she probably was hooning...
Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: My wife flips out on my every time I drive anywhere in the snow because I do that around every corner.
The girlfriend actually freaked out when recently when I was screwing around in the snow... even though the first time I met her before we started dating, I did a perfect 360 @ 70km/h down a narrow single lane street in the winter (I was younger and much dumber-er then).
She has an irrational fear of driving in snow. It is awful. And rather than allow me to teach her how to get better/more confident about it, she has veto'd the fun. I suppose this is that "compromise" thing in relationships 
The joy of Hooning cannot be quantified, your in or your out, the girl in video above appears to be in.
I'm sure there is a local legal drift scene around, just a manner of finding it and then signing up, as I'm sure they have beginner classes. I know mid atlantic area has drift nirvana...
GPS wife took the beginner course and flunked. (Sorry GPS 
I had to)
In reply to True_Racer:
She's so cute! My wife would be in tears and hating my guts no matter what I did or said LOL. Very good, patient teaching in the vid.
I'm not a drifter, just someone with a decent amount of auto-x and a few driving schools (and a lot of snow hooning) under his belt. It's incredible how what is now instinct to me is so foreign to someone who has never done it. A real eye-opening example of the lack of car control in the average driver.
Yeah the gf is not a big fan of hooning. She'll come around once I teach her how
Awesome video and nice E36 M3! I really do think it is a huge advantage to know how to control a car once grip is lost. People can be so clueless, and you just have to wonder how many wrecks could have been avoided if car control were more prominently taught.
Maybe one day you can take her to one of those open drift events once she's good enough! I have a vid of my first time, for anyone interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ0Py5eMH6I
HiTempguy wrote:Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: My wife flips out on my every time I drive anywhere in the snow because I do that around every corner.The girlfriend actually freaked out when recently when I was screwing around in the snow... even though the first time I met her before we started dating, I did a perfect 360 @ 70km/h down a narrow single lane street in the winter (I was younger and much dumber-er then). She has an irrational fear of driving in snow. It is awful. And rather than allow me to teach her how to get better/more confident about it, she has veto'd the fun. I suppose this is that "compromise" thing in relationships
I found a way around that. I pull over, toss her the keys, and calmly tell her "fine, if you think you can do better, YOU drive. hasnt been an issue since.
Wet skidpad is TOO MUCH FUN! Great to see she's into it.
My home club for HPDE is BMW CCA National Capital Chapter, and they are of the car control philosophy. Mandatory instructed wet skidpad sessions, both days of every track weekend, with aptitude scores in your file. You won't get an invitation to their instructor school until you're getting consistent top scores, showing ability to initiate over and under steer & recover from it at will.
Other clubs around here hire them to run the skidpad sessions at their track weekends. Like PCA Founder's Region. But it's not mandatory for anybody except the novices. So it's first-come, first-serve on the signups, and I can usually work in 40 minutes a day easily between track sessions.
Can't wait to get my kids out there, but they have to be 18. So for now, it's autocross novice school for me and my high school junior weekend after next.
In reply to TRoglodyte: Tell her that women seem to be tentative in performance driving situations. This is my 4th season autocrossing, and most women say they're too nervous to push them and their car 100%.
Ok, I'll be the first to raise HIS hand and say... HELP! My wife and I LOVE the skidpad portion of the NW BMWCCA skills class, but neither of us can master the skidpad drift. Watching your wife makes me think of MY issues...
Car - stock 128i (no LSD, DSP off). Front only swaybar, no rear.
Issues, quick (mash) power applied, and around she goes. I try keeping my foot in it (I think), and countersteering, but maybe I'm too slow with the steering input? Watching Chris Harris's videos, it looks like he just "spins" the wheel in countersteer to catch the drift. Is that how fast you need to feed it in?
The converse is that in wet autocrosses (wet or dry), we both seem to be able to control power on oversteer, but then again, I'm not hanging the rear out in extreme angles there... just balancing the power past the apex.
Can you post a video of you doing it incar so I can see the "right" way to drift? And for the record, my wife is pretty good in the AX, she's usually within a second of my times, and I'm usually the fastest stock BMW out there.
Thanks!
That was much better than my attempt at the "snow powerslide" into work yesterday.
In reply to 4Msfam:
On a wet skidpad - if you want to run a wide angle you have to countersteer a bit later and a lot more than you do when controlling the car in a corner. The wheel has to move FAST!. You still have to pause to partially unload the springs but before it hooks up... do it again. It takes less effort to hold it than to catch it. You are probably letting the tail get too far around to catch either by starting too late or not moving the wheel fast enough.
Do you have snow near you? Snow is much slicker than wet blacktop so you can get awesome drama to happen at very low speeds where you have time to play with all of the adjustments while the car is sliding to see what effect it has. Spend time in a snowy parking lot and your timing will fix itself. The five or ten passes around the pad you get at a BMW event with everyone watching you are just not enough time to get the hang of it.
Also google "Scandinavian Flick". Practice, practice, practice! ;)
This.
I'm still struggling, but I spent a long time with using much foot and not being fast enough with the hands.
To get to oversteer without too much throttle, maybe try putting the car in understeer by raising your speed with a constant radius steering input until the front starts to chatter, then feather up the throttle until RIGHT at the point the tires hook back up, then give the throttle a light tap. Really light, like you're pressing an elevator button with your toe instead of your finger, and the back end will come out in a controlled way. Get the countersteer in really fast, and keep looking in the direction you want the car to go, then gently apply more throttle and increase/decrease countersteer in small amounts as needed to hold the angle of oversteer.
Easier said than done, at least in my case. No chance a guy like me would ever learn this from an internet video. I'm the world's slowest learner of driving skills, I swear, so seat time is the only way I ever get better. Industrial park parking lots on rainy nights help.
Another tip is to do try hooning on dirt/gravel roads. The slippery surface will allow you to rotate the rear end of the car without having to be really aggressive on the throttle, and should reduce the tendency to wear out tires quickly. It's risky, of course, because a mistake can send you in the ditch or a tree, hopefully at slow speeds. 
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