Plenty of cars these days come equipped with some form of stability control to prevent cars from skidding out of control—but it doesn’t make for particularly adventurous driving. But never fear, folks. Team O’Neil Rally School is here to show you how to slide with stability control activated.
Now, a pretty simple answer to this problem is to just completely disable the stability control features, but that’s not always an option, especially if you’re leasing your car or hooning a rental. Here’s how to do it:
Wyatt Knox takes you through the steps that you need to know, so I’ll let him do most of the talking and just add a few notes here myself. He takes out a Ford Explorer cop car to show you how things are done.
The main thing to note here is that you should probably already have some skill at throwing around cars that don’t have stability control, since this whole process comes down to driver skill. You kind of need to know what the car should be doing when you start a maneuver because this whole exercise is all about learning how to counter that. So, maybe learn the ropes before you take that rental to the autocross.
Knox goes into detail on six different tips for this process. You’ll have to watch the video to see them explained, but in brief, they are:
- Disable what you can
- Turn in hard and fast
- Stay turned in longer
- Link turns and pendulum
- Listen and learn
- Let DSC fix problems
Knox is a professional, so he makes things look pretty easy, but anyone with motivation, a place to practice, and a little bit of preliminary skill can likely accomplish what he’s teaching here.
And if you can play with your car however you want, then consider disabling all those traction control features—there’s a video for that, too.