Of the many car driving tips that can be offered, this one is not intuitive: Accelerate through corners to get better traction. It appears that accelerating through a curve would cause the vehicle to lose traction and collapse. It does if you apply too much, but the limited throttle improves traction when cornering.
To understand this, let’s first look at traction. Next, let’s see how a vehicle wants to behave when cornering, and then put the two together.
Traction is…
Traction is necessary to travel in the direction we want. When we accelerate away from a stop, the vehicle moves because it has traction with the road. It intelligently pulls away from the curb if we accelerate more because more acceleration provides more traction, to the point where we lose traction due to applying too much power to the drive wheels.
If we are on snow and ice, almost any strong acceleration will cause the wheels to skid and the vehicle to slide in a way that behaves more according to momentum and gravity than to the direction in which we are driving. If we speed up slightly, we are likely to move in the shape and direction we expect.
Think in terms of vectors…
Now, think of a vehicle’s travel in terms of a single vector pointing in the direction your vehicle wants to travel. When you drive in a straight line, there is a vector pointing directly in front of you because the drive wheels push or pull you in that direction. Pretty easy to understand.
Now, imagine the vector when you travel around a curve. It is pointing forward and to the outside of the curve because you are moving forward but the momentum wants to take you off the road. If you accelerate hard, you’ll lose traction and slide in the direction of the momentum – the vector is pointing hard to the outside of the curve as you go off the road. It’s the same as if you had hit ice on a curve: you lose traction and the vehicle goes where momentum and gravity want it to go.
Putting it all together…
In light of the previous example where we lost traction in a corner, it’s easy to understand that more traction will keep us going in the direction we want (simply because the loss of traction had the opposite effect). We also found that higher acceleration provides better traction, up to a point.
So if we throttle just a little then we are taking advantage of the improved traction and effectively redirecting the vector to point more towards the desired direction of travel and away from the outside of the corner. This is why experienced riders will slow down a bit going into a turn and speed up through the turn; this helps them “stay” on the road with more traction.
Try it yourself…
Here’s an experiment to prove the point. Drive briskly around a curve you take often and see how you feel. Then the next time you drive around the bend, just drop back a bit and see how it feels. Then the next time you drive around the curve, use a slight throttle. You’ll notice the difference between the three approaches and convince you that limited acceleration promotes traction in a corner.
Again, of all the driving tips, this one isn’t intuitive, but it’s true that cornering acceleration provides a wider margin of safety due to improved traction.