tail spins- best advice - Page 2 - Porsche General - PistonHeads UK

Get a 4wd, youll be safer and faster.

Go slower, don't you know speed kills.

Get it on a skid pan - you need training, your driving will improve and you'll have more fun.

You should never lift off with a 911 - they try and kill you if you do that. Most cars will fishtail under these circumstances, but a 911 has an engine waiting to overtake the front end with the weight imbalance. Depressing the clutch is preferable to lifting off, and works very effectively in most sports cars. The 911 is not 'most sports cars' though, and the weight transfer may also aggravate the spin. The correct way to prevent a spin in a 911 is to keep the power down and ride it out on opposite lock. You then hope you haven't got too much momentum, have got enough lock on quick enough, and have enough room to do this manoeuvre. If it all goes shitshape and you spin, immediately put clutch in and stamp on the brakes. This is the theory. Putting it into practice is something else, as the local badger population will testify after I got it wrong in my RS!!!!

Dom beat me to it and I can only echo one of the points he has made- You should never lift off with a 911 You should never lift off with a 911 You should never lift off with a 911 hope that helps

Lift-off mid corner in a 911 is a BIG no no! Trouble is having the balls too not lift off on a public road....

Fight your instincts to lift off...I remember being told this when I got my first 911. having taken the car out on to quiet roads and arriving at corners faster than I thought sensible,keep it there..... before i could shout "fcu.... ...." the car was round the bend by the 3rd letter. try it just remeber you are the pupil,she knows a lot more than you and be keen to learn. Once you have got the hang of this,you will understand why we do not buy M3,944 or 4wd for that matter. have fun carefully.

Lifing off mid-corner in an all wheel drive 911 is nothing like as dodgy, since it automatically sends a healthy dollop of power to the front wheels to keep the car on track. I was reading one of the Brooklands road test books over the weekend. I was initially surprised that Porsche claimed that even in the dry the 993C4 was 0.5 to 1.0 seconds quicker per lap than the 993C2 on a typical club circuit. However this was borne out by a magazine test done at the MIRA test circuit, where it was (obviously) quicker in the wet but also marginally quicker in dry conditions. So Porsche must have done a pretty good job I reckon, given the slight increase in weight and friction losses.

Where is the 'power going to the front wheels' coming from if you have lifted off the acellerator?

Does your engine stop when you lift off then?

PSM I presume? Personally I didn't think it did this.

The power on all C4 911 derivatives is differentiated between front & rear wheels as required. There have been 3 different 4wd systems on 964,993 &now 996. On the 996 this is the first one to have a brain rather than mechanical diff distribution(viscous clutch / couplings) to adjust the power in addition to PSM which adjusts corresponding wheel braking and accelerator inputs with the fly by wire throttle. I beleive standard the 996 C4 system is 95-5% ratio (rear to front) which can shift to 60-40% as required. On this car you are not aware of a shift in bias as you go into a corner,the car remains very flat through a corner,although hugely effective it is less rewarding than a C2.The difference is pronounced in the wet where the C4 is sublime.

I've got a 993 C2 so no limp wristed PSM for me (only kidding). So lets get this right - I never lift off the power if its starts to go. OK, got it. I'd love to try a skid pan and airfield to get a feel for the car's limits and I've looked for one near me but I can't find anything. (the only aerodrome near me only does Kart racing and they looked at me funny when I suggested I wanted to raz around in my Porsche - as in why would he want to do that ?. One old bloke helpfully suggested I'd get beaten by the karts anyway.. ) In fact I wasn't going fast anyway - honest. I was only tootling along. The mud on the road surface was what got it going I suspect. Thanks guys.

This is what I read in Christophorous now I think about it. Thanks for that.

Skid avoidance is the best policy -don't get in to one!! Brooklands runway in Surrey is available for 'playing'. Mel

The 964 C4 was oft criticised for its unpredictable nature in slippery conditions which is why they went back to the drawing boards for the 993. The 993 C4 (as the 996) has a 95%r/5%f split in normal driving conditions, though this can go as high as 60r/40f in slippery conditions (sliding out of T-junctions using waaay too much power in the wet). Because the power shift to the front wheels in the 993 is less sudden than it was in the 964 they could make the prop/diff a little lighter (because it has to endure less stress) which is why 964 C4 adds 70kg over C2, whereas 993 C4 adds 50kg over C2. Best part about the 964/993 is that there is NO PSM! The 993 C4's had ABD (but only up to 44mph) and the dynamic driving differential (which is a 25% LSD under power but a 40% LSD off the power to stabilise the tail in lift off situations) but there's no fancy pants PSM to spoil the fun... www.VerySideways.com (what's in a name???)

Psm spoiling the fun???......Having driven & owned a few 911 of varying sorts I would not put PSM down so much. I specced it on my car as I thought it may help resale,I am more than impressed with it.I find you can drive up to it giving you more confidence than you otherwise would.Plus you can turn the system off. Driving a C4 talking about spoiling the fun?

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Surely if you are lifting then you are entering the corner too fast, so the question may well be whether or not it is better to make a hole in the scenery forwards, backwards or sideways

No, but it makes very little torque (and therefore power). When you lift off the throttle is closed and you can only burn a limited amount of fuel - you are effectively making the same torque as at idle and we all know how much torque that is. Not enough to move the car forwards.

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Just to set the record straight I wasn't going very quickly at all. Honestly . It was mud and rain on the road that set the back sliding. OK I was putting the power down but nowhere near anything spectacular. I suppose it was a bit like driving on a skid pan or on snow. I like the comment about making holes in the scenery . I'll try to avoid sliding the back out in future. I don't normally do this and was taken by suprise at how easily it happend. Great fun though, was tempted to go back and do it again but clipping the kerb seemed all too posible and that's not a good idea is it ? It might have been captured on our CCTV system. Wonder if I can get a copy of it ? Security Patrol have already left a note on my window 'reminding' me the speed limit is 20 mph (cheeky sods, I drive my partners Astra much quicker and they don't pick that up do they !)

Not having driven one I bow to your superior experience. I read the magazines as well Most new cars are calibrated to avoid stall at low revs (up to the limit of the limp home position of the throttle) so torque at idle is difficult to demonstrate. I did most of my mucking about in the good old days of carbs...

Lift off in the bend - I would have thought if you are understearing this is all you can do, sure if the front grips but the back slides then try and gently ride it out. A question though, PSM, im sure this cuts the power to the rear and brakes one or more wheels as apt. Does the PSM cut the power in a tail slide? (as opposed to understear, or both) If you do go into a spin as one of the earlier post said jump onto the brakes, the only extra I would add is to keep them on untill you have 100% stopped moving, as people will let off the brakes before you have actually stopped moving.

Popped into work on the weekend and found a nice right hand bend with some rain and mud on it. Unsuprsingly the back end of the 911 decided to go a different route to my intended and I had to do some rather swift reverse lock to get out of it. Question is - I took my foot off the gas but didn't depress the clutch. Is this the right thing to do in these circumstances ? Thanks !