Spinning at Buttonwillow (1CW)
 

My Subaru (or maybe it was me) decided to get in touch with its rallying roots this weekend. Here is the video:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wig-xiC5dpY"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wig-xiC5dpY[/ame]

Basically I was exiting the esses right at about 100 Mph, had a little tank slapper (I've been learning to turn off the VSC and had it in sport to get more of a feeling of car reactions before turning it all the way off, and I was trying to hold fairly steady to let its do its thing instead of having too many cooks in the kitchen) and basically came right to the edge of the bumper or maybe past it (hard to say).

In any event, either I didn't release lock and go straight fast enough as the front wheel went off or the traction control was trying to overdamp the tank slapper and braked the left side as the right lost traction. The end result was one hell of a ride and a very, very dirty car. Luckily I stopped before that wall and the car (and me) seem to be fine (though one bleeder screw on my Sprint kit came a little loose but was fine after re-tightening it).

Tonight I will try and make the video a bit better. I threw this together this morning so I can show people what happened.

holy cow :confused0068:

glad you and car are safe.

It was one hell of a ride!

So much stuff happened so quickly; that was probably the fastest I've ever exited the esses. Usually I was a couple of Mph slower before that. The line felt perfect, my track out was going to lead me right up to the berm and then the tank slapper happened and (this is my speculation as I've been pondering this since it happened) I got pushed out further. I don't know if that was partly the traction control or if simply the slip angle on the rear meant loosing that much distance, but it seemed alright before that.

Like many times that day (I'd just got a new alignment with only camber bolts which seems to have made the rear pretty happy) I was wanting to counter steer as I felt the rear end start to slide, but I knew that the traction control would pull the rear end in and I didn't want to spin the other direction on the next flap (VSC was on sport as I inch towards turning it all the way off). When the car was on its second flap I didn't realize I was so close to the edge and then it all went! I'm happy that I did do some counter steer and try to go straight as things started happening, but I was too late. Also I did both feet in as I came around (probably at around 140 degrees)but that was later than I should have been. I had the right reactions, just not fast enough.

One really interesting thing is that after the car settled into the curve I see I added some steering input. Looking at the movement of my shoulders I think I did it by accident when I was trying to push myself back into the seat. Fascinatingly I think this might have been what caused the tank slapper in the first place. The timing lines up perfectly that the jostle as I tried to push my shoulder into the seat is right when the rear end stepped out!

So many lessons, so much to learn! I accepted that this was part of the sport when I started but that doesn't change the terror when things go south.

You got very, very lucky, not hitting that wall.

Do you have a datalog I can look at? Or, a full res video of the in-car?

It doesn't look like the car got loose to me; it looks like you just dropped 2 and hooked across.

Your foot on the gas and your steering angle on a portion of the track that has less grip caused the slide. Even if you attempt to catch it, your steering input is too slow. Glad you came out okay. Most cars would be on top of the fence with about 3 flips if you dug into the ground a certain way.

I absolutely agree; I was crazy lucky there. My heart sunk fast when I saw that wall coming up on me; it was approaching really, really fast. That the sand stopped me like that is frankly amazing!

I will get a full res video up in a little bit, I need to cut it down to the relevant parts. I also had harry's lap timer running but I don't know how to get the data off of it.

As far as the car getting loose, I can say with certainty that the tail end was stepping out, and the VSC did cause a minor tank slapper (this was well before I got over to the bumper). I wasn't trying to catch that but instead just ride it out as a learning experience. Honestly I don't know if that had anything to do with the actual spin or not; when the tank slapper started I let too much focus go to that and I didn't even realize I had dropped one or two wheels until I saw the video. This was only the second time I have been four wheels off.

I guess this really goes to show how upper beginner to intermediate drivers are the ones in the most danger; we know enough to pickup quite alot of speed but when shit hits the fan we are likely to come out a mess.

I agree, everything I did was too slow there. I tried to go straight after the car was spinning and I put both feet in three fourths of the way across the track. We get told all these things to do when something goes wrong, but it is hard to put it into practice fast enough the first time you encounter it. I'd never spun before this and I had only had one four wheel off event.

All that said I am a little proud that in all that mess I was just too late instead of not doing those things at all.

Also, I am very, very happy to have a dirty car and a crazy video instead of what very well could have been a trip to the hospital.

I can see a tiny bit of yawing; I think the berm upset the VSC. The paint has less grip, and may have been enough to confuse the VSC under the circumstances.

Here is the full-res video from in the car: [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVdv84e-lg"]In car video of spinning at Buttonwillow - YouTube[/ame]
Unfortunately the outside world is so washed out that it is hard to tell what exactly is going on.

In terms of the yawing that started pretty quickly after I bump the steering wheel trying to get myself into the seat better (I think I bump it once pushing myself into the seat and then bump it a second, harder time as I settle into the seat). With the stock seats I end up with sore arms after a day at the track because I am hanging so hard on the wheel.

Lock your belt next time.

Flip your headrest and lean the seat further, will be much more comfortable

Btw, the in car video is 1080p 60 fps and the car top video is 2.7K 30 fps (and I can put that up easily enough if you want it also). I am really curious to learn more about what happened; I've been pondering it all day (and frankly still been in a little bit of shock since yesterday afternoon). I've been bouncing between "damn that was cool" to "Holly hell that could have been such a disaster".

Talking to people that don't do HPDEs all day it seems like very few (if any) of them realize just how terrifying and bad this really was!

I am doing much better, I've been signed up with a local race shop for a month now to get a custom roll bar and hard mounted race seat installed with six point harnesses. A week from Wednesday I'll be giving my car up for a week and a half as they create and weld it in.

Its hard to say what happened without data logging. But from my view you had traction loss, dropped two wheels and VSC just shifted to rear causing the car to rotate, your reaction was off and so was the car. Obviously in retrospect you can disect it but, I'd say run with all VSC off and back off a bit run 8-9/10ths. Do some karting on the side if you can, rentals even to help improve split second reaction times if you dont do autox.

Thanks for posting something that did not have a nasty ending!

So I just tinkered with Harry's lap timer and got a little bit of information out of it but I don't think it is of sufficient quality to really tell much. The acceleration information is probably going to be off because the mount I had holding it half broke (so it wouldn't come out but it wasn't really steady with the car) earlier in the day. Anyway, the things it exported are here:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?...1E&usp=sharing

The "not a nasty ending" part is really just thanks to luck!

My personal opinion is that the VSC breeds bad habits - you are not learning how the car behaves at all, you are learning how the electronics behave. If you rely on the nannies and the nannies are defeated, you have no recourse AND you weren't expecting it.

That said once you're along for the ride, not countersteering might've been the correct call. I've seen cars catch in that situation while pointed straight at the wall and...smash. More preferable to that would've been much faster/earlier countersteer as others have said, or straightening the wheel and putting two off safely. Heck, even four off. I'd much rather go off into the dirt at 100mph in a straight line than off sideways at any speed.

If you have a choice, don't let yourself become a passenger.

Its important to learn how to stay in control when you lose control if that makes sense. In your case, if you had countersteered and put both feet in right away you could have sent the car down the track and came to a stop in the road, avoiding the dirt and staying clear of the wall. Obviously thats not always easy but its important to avoid walls lol. When you lock up your tires, whatever direction you car is going in, it will continue to go in a strait line. My first spin i went off to the left. Second spin i came to a stop in the middle of the track. Lesson learned

this is exactly what it looks like to me.

this is what billy johnson (read fast. like 1:37s fast) had to say about this exact thing: "The most common error for this corner is apexing it and the prior corners too early. Like Turn 13/Lost Hill, many cars go off here with a bad result, hook-spinning and crashing into the inside wall on the left, sometimes even writing off the entire car. This can be avoided by executing the line well and slowly building up the speed without compromising the line. If you find yourself in a situation where you are going to drop tires off on the exit of Turn 20, or any corner for that matter, ride it out. Keep the steering wheel straight since it is perfectly fine to drive with two tires in the dirt and slowly bring the car back onto the track once the car is back under control. Panicing when you drop tires and trying to immediately jerk it back on to the track is a major reason cars hook-spin to the opposite side of the track, and this can be easily avoided by staying calm and riding it out. "

Dang man glad you are ok. Did you flood the car? Sounded like it didnt start after the spin.

It was a long crank to start it after the spin but it started up and seems to be running fine now. I am guessing that one of two things happened. Either:
1) I was too slow (or hell, maybe I missed the clutch) putting both feet in and the engine either stopped or ran backwards or
2) the car detected "Crazy bad shit happening"(tm) and turned everything off in a sense like the fuel pump cut off impact sensor. I don't know what all triggers such safety/anti-fire mechanisms but this was a flat spin from 100 Mph so the car was subject to quite a bit of force. One of the strange things was I don't think there were any lights on in the car at all when I came to a rest.

Dang..any after pics of the interior? That looked like a dirt tsunami going inside your car in the 2nd vid. Good u made it out in 1 piece.

Glad you are ok, scary that you couldn't see anything while spinning in the dirt.

Outside picture is after removing tape numbers and driving around at 45 Mph to clean the dirt, inside shot is later at a gas station.

Original pictures are at: https://plus.google.com/photos/10923...CLTD-_75r9b-eg

I could actually see alot more than you would think and that made it all the more scary. In the video when you see me looking out the window, I saw the wall coming at me at 20 or 30 Mph and it was getting CLOSE! I seriously came only a few feet from impact. I actually rolled away from the wall some before the dust cleared enough to see anything.

What wheels are you running? are you still 17x8? Did you switch to +48 like you were looking at doing or is it still +35?

Those are the Enkei PF01 18x8.5 +48mm that I was waiting to have delivered when we met.

OP, this looks like a pretty straight forward situation to me. This has nothing to do with VSC.

It has everything to do with you still having steering lock applied when you dropped 2 off and immediately came back on track. You hooked the car. This is almost impossible to save. Think about it this way: When you drop 2 off and your steering wheel is still turned in a direction that will take you back on track, the FRONT tires gets back on pavement first and regains traction. However, the rear still doesn't have traction while it's on dirt. Then the rear suddenly gains traction as it comes back onto the pavement, and you still have steering lock. What happens then is major oversteer. The vast majority of cars have been lost on the race track in this fashion. Turn 3 and 4 at Laguna Seca. Turn 15 at Thunderhill.

What you should have done:
a) Realized that you were going too fast through that turn and that you weren't going to make it
b) drive straight off the track. Not just off. Straight off.
c) allow the car to settle and slow down off the track
d) slowly and gently bring the car back onto the track in a fashion where you are gliding back onto to the track with your steering wheel pointed straight forward as you get back on.

All this other talk about countersteer, adding throttle, reacting faster, etc, etc means nothing. As soon as you dropped 2 off, that all went out the window.

BTW, this wasn't a tank slapper. A tank slapper involves the rear end rotating from one direction to another. You only rotated in one direction: counter clockwise.

Glad to see that all you needed was a vacuum cleaner to get back into play. :cheers:

Skip to 17:57
This is what you did:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAZV_o3b7NU"]Ana BRZ Laguna Seca Session 2 - YouTube[/ame]



Start at 3:48 and ignore the ridiculous fanfare. Watch my steering wheel position
Go to 5:38, and you can watch from behind.
This is what you should do:
[ame="http://youtu.be/QsEVH4z8Eec"]http://youtu.be/QsEVH4z8Eec?t=3m48s[/ame]

There are alot of things I am still unsure about with all of this, but one that I am completely certain of is that the rear end of the car was yawing (relative to the front end) back and forth. It was not a major tank slapper and is barely visible in the video (frankly it is barely visible in the full res video even), but it did happen. I don't know if that had anything to do with the actual off or if it just distracted me so I didn't see how close I was to the berm, but it was there. If I had seen/felt I was going off I would have gone straight (which may be due to the distraction of the tail wagging) which I've done before (dropping two wheels and also on the other time I've gone four wheels off). Once I felt the tail pop I tried to go straight but it was too late.

As far as the actual dropping wheels off, even though it looks kind of like it from the video, I am not sure my front right wheel actually went off the berm. The rear right did for sure though. Tonight I am going to setup the gopro again and get some frame grabs to see where things line up from that perspective.

Honestly I managed to get myself into a situation that overwhelmed both my safety buffer (consumed by exiting the turn faster than I had ever exited it before and maybe some effect of the tail wagging making me track further out) and my ability to handle emergency situations (because there was a minor strange thing happening to the tail of the car that took my focus). Part of the learning experience is to understand what happened and my gut is telling me that this might not be the classic two wheels dropped scenario.

That is all you need for what happened to occur.

And that is where things are really fascinating there. What I remember feeling was that the tail went right, then VSC pulled it left and then it started going right again (which I think might have been part of the VSC catching the leftward movement) at which point it just went the whole way around. You can see some of this I think if you watch the video very closely as the suspension unloads from the left hand side for two or three frames before starting to go around.

Irrespective of if the VSC over corrected and pushed the rear wheel out or if it was just natural oversteer, I have a major fault here in that I should have triggered my go straight recovery plan as I came to the berm with oversteer happening. Unfortunately I am not as experienced dealing with oversteer (and where the car is while oversteering) as I am with other non-optimal handling scenarios. Before this double day I had been using stock alignment and mostly all VSC on full so situations like this would have been nose first. Tail being the outside point (relative to the tarmac) is not something I have much experience with yet.

On a totally unrelated note, do you go with HOD very often? I've been to several with them so I'm wondering if I've seen you there.

Did you feel this happening after you dropped a wheel off? If so, yes, VSC was trying to save you. However, as I said before, this type of situation is almost impossible to save, even with stability control.

Yes, I frequent HOD events. You have probably seen me there.

BTW, this is a real tank slapper (start at 0:53) ;)
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k37BQvcKk6c"]Laguna Seca Near Disaster July 2012 - YouTube[/ame]

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't be calling it a tank slapper since that implies a much stronger and longer duration back and forth.

What I am referring to started well before I was to the berm. Specifically, a little after I passed the apex I added some steering input (I think I was trying to get myself back into the seat better and basically bumped the wheel as I tried to lever back into the seat) to the left. This brought the rear end out a little and the VSC activated. At this point it brought the rear back relative to the direction of travel or even slightly to the left. At this point I am just a foot or two from the berm, and either the tires just caught hold and pushed it back right or the VSC tried to damp the oscillation and started it going right again. Either way, the end result was that the rear stepped out that half foot or so needed to get off the berm and start the spin. All I knew at the time was that instead of a damping oscillation it just kept going. I went to straight but it was too little too late. I didn't even realize at the time that any tires had dropped until I saw the video.

Another detail about the day in general is that I was trying to explore the sensations of oversteer and traction sensing on the tail of the car by getting some slight oversteer going and letting the VSC catch it (well, really I was trying to get some oversteer without the VSC activating but I'm not that good at balancing the car yet). I was primarily doing this on Bus stop but I think I let some of that creep into other turns such as this one. My goal was to get familiar with the sensation before totally disabling VSC so I would have a better set of reactions when the tail started to come out. Obviously it didn't work out so well...

Bottom line is, you were going too fast through that corner. The error was not realizing that soon enough. VSC on/off is irrelevant. If it was off, you would have spun as well and most likely sooner because you added steering input after going past the apex. You had to add steering input because the line you were driving was going to take you off course. Adding that steering input pushed the car into oversteer, your VSC probably stopped you from spinning out before you dropped a wheel. Once you dropped the wheel off, it was beyound what VSC could save.

VSC doesn't allow much slip angle at all. Bouncing off VSC isn't the best way to do this. Skid pad is the best way to practice this, IMO. I rented out the skid pad at thill recently, and this really helped me a lot.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PxFUqr9u3Y"]Skid pad practice at Thunderhill - YouTube[/ame]

What you experienced was slip angle. Maintaining slip angle is the fastest state of cornering.

It's what people are referring to when they say that they feel like the car is "floating" when I drive, and that my steering inputs seem to have no correlation with what the car is doing.

At a basic level, your steering inputs shift the direction of the front of the car. At a more advanced level, your driving inputs shift the thrust angle of the car.

I don't think he was going too fast through the corner. VSC was not stopping the slip angle (it allows some slip).

What did happen, IMO, is that he got nervous as a result of the slip angle, and eased up on turning compared to what he would normally do, which ultimately resulted in a 2 off. The increased velocity doesn't help.

There were two other issues that happened there; one was that I hit a bit of an early apex and the second is that I was pretty far out from the apex. The first was just a simple mistake, the second is an artifact of my originally being scared of the track out with the nasty inside berm being tall (so fear of hitting it and having the tires come off the ground and killing traction).