Don't Run Out In Tha Streetz And Fishtail Your Corvette Until You Read This Article

Two weeks ago, the TTAC Black Friday Special was all about Corvette crashes. Not just any Corvette crashes, however. We’re talking about the very special kind of Vette crash that happens when you’re just driving along and… something happens to make you jam that accelerator down and lose control.

What’s that something? Experienced Corvette-ologists know that common provocations to throttle-based havoc include:

• the presence of your daughter’s sexy-ass friends, particularly if one of them is named “Sharona”;
• hearing the chorus of the famous Golden Earring song, “Radar Love”
• but worst of all, when somebody has the son-of-a-bitching nerve to drive up next to you at the stop sign in another Corvette!

From there it all goes downhill… but TTAC is here to help. When Corvettes attack, just click the jump to find out what to do.

Why do Corvettes (and other high-power rear-wheel-drive cars) suddenly “fishtail” under acceleration? It’s simple: The driver sends enough power to the rear wheels that they begin to spin. We intrinsically understand that a spinning rear tire has less accelerative traction, but did you ever consider that when the rear tires are spinning, they aren’t generating very much cornering traction? Imagine that someone is doing a standing burnout in a Corvette. As the back rubber is smoking, you could run up to the Corvette, push against the fender, and move the back end sideways. If you’re strong enough. I’ve seen it done at the midnight-dickweed-street-race events I attended back in the late Nineties. Spinning rear wheels won’t keep the back end in line, if something acts to throw it off.

Most dragstrips are perfectly level from side to side, plus they are straight. So it’s not unusual to see someone smoke from the beginning to the end of the strip without too much trouble. Real roads, however, have curves, and they have camber. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve personally experienced a “fishtail” because I spun the rear tires underway on a road with a lot of camber. The street in front of my subdivision is viciously crowned, and if I’m driving my Town Car on ice there, any rear-wheel spin whatsoever immediately prompts the whole back of the car to slouch towards the Bethlehem of the ditch. There’s a constant force acting on the car, you see, that wants it fall into the ditch. That force is resisted by your tires. When you are driving along a high-centered road, you are actually constantly steering up towards the crown of that road. Lose your traction, and you will find out.

Front-wheel-drive cars have the same problem, and if you’ve ever owned a Neon SRT-4 with a big-boost kit or something similar you’ve seen your nose slide towards the ditch when the front wheels spin. It’s much easier to fix that problem. Take your foot off the throttle and you’ll recover.

Even where the road is relatively flat, you might still be applying some light cornering load to the rear tires of your ‘Vette when they break loose. You might be jockeying for position in the lane, you might have a crosswind, the road may be veering off to one direction or another. In the case of the “Thanksgiving Turkey” video, I think the driver on the right was looking at the one on the left and ever-so-slightly steering towards him as a consequence. People tend to steer the car in the direction of their eyes. That’s why road racers avert their eyes from in-progress crashes. Or it’s why they should, anyway. In practice, half of the time we just drive into the pile and then moan like Nigel Mansell at the next drivers’ meeting.

Alright, so here we are. For whatever eminently avoidable reason, we’ve punched the throttle on our Vette, the back wheels have started spinning, and the view through our windshield has lurched dramatically as the nose of the car points towards a tree/Jersey barrier/schoolbus full of children/thoroughly freaked-out dude in a Chrysler SRT-8. What do we do next?

This is what most drivers do: they wang the steering wheel off in some freaky direction to “save it”, then they jump off the throttle and step on the brake. It’s basic $299 triple-A driver’s-ed training. IF BAD THINGS HAPPEN STEP ON MAGIC SAFETY PEDAL. Taking that course of action causes a few things to happen:

• The rear wheels get their traction back.
• The front wheels get an extra load of traction thanks to the nose pitching forward over them.

Thank God. We’re in the traction zone again! The car is now going to go exactly where it’s pointed, no drama.

Except.

Where’s the car pointed, and which way are the front wheels pointed? Well, we know the car is pointed at something bad. That’s what freaked you out in the first place, right? So now you’re still pointed at the tree, except instead of fishtailing past it with the car headed generally straight, you’re now in an excellent position to drive right into it. And sometimes that’s exactly what happens.

If the driver has applied any steering motion during the fishtail, however, when traction is regained the Vette will make a max-g dart in the direction of the steering. That’s not trivial. If the driver was steering away from the skid, he’s going to shoot straight into the wall, pronto. If he’s been counter-steering, the car will dart back in the direction from whence it was sliding. This is where the oscillation begins.

Look at some of the Vette videos and see how the car just starts rocking wildly back and forth. That’s the driver trying to keep up with the oscillation he’s set in motion. The Vette heaves in one direction, so he throws a wild steering correction in. It’s too much steering, so the traction limit of the front wheels is briefly exceeded. When the steering recovers, the Vette flings in that direction and the guy swings the wheel again.

This video shows a mild form of it at the 0:40 mark, just to show that this issue isn’t exclusive to Vettes or high-powered cars:

The waterboxer 911 slides the tail, so the d00d cranks the wheel too hard to correct. When he gets his traction, that “correction” yanks him right off the track.

And here’s a Vette vid from Black Friday showing the oscillation/correction: