Power Sliding a car

Power Sliding a car

Rally Driving Power Slides
How to Power Slide when Rally Driving

What is Power sliding?
Power Sliding is where you get the rear wheels of the car to lose traction with the road surface and “slide” round.
You also find that if you are going round a left hand corner you will have the steering wheel aiming to turn right although you will still be going round the left hand corner.

What is the need of power sliding?
The reason power slides are important in Rally Driving is because sometimes it offers drivers the fastest way to get round a corner when time is all important.
Add to that often the road conditions underneath are quite loose gravel and dirt so there is not that much grip and it is easy for the car to go into a slide anyway so being able to control the slide is all important too.
If you want to drive a rally car then a Rally Driving Experience will give you the opportunity to practice power sliding.

How to Power slide?
Before we explain how to power slide we must stress that you do not try doing it on public roads. You should keep that for private roads or specific open spaces designated for trying it and away from other people!
1. Approach a corner at the usual speed you would go around it.

2. Drive around the corner and be close to the apex (the middle part of the corner), just as you start to straighten to come out of the corner you need to dip the accelerator and turn slightly into the corner again which will help the rear tires lose traction with the surface.

3. Once the rear of the car has lost traction it will start to come round so you need to catch it by steering into the slide (if the car is sliding around a right hand corner you would start to steer left) to try and keep the nose of the car pointing in the direction you want to head.

4. You need to keep the accelerator under control with bursts of controlled power to keep a power slide going, you do not need to keep the accelerator fully on all the time as this will result in you losing control and going into a spin.