I’ve driven race cars with forms of active controls and they are sensational, as long as the programming is right. I know this because they are (mostly) banned in every major racing league: NASCAR, Formula 1, ALMS, Le Mans, and my preferred racing arena: Pro Rally. Traction control and electronic stability control definitely make you faster. Unless home is Hollywood.īut what about on the racetrack? Can you go faster around a track with all these electronic devices disabled? This is what we wanted to find out. So we pull fuses, extract relays, unplug sensors, put vice-grips on brake lines, and a bunch of other things you should not try at home. When we want to make a bad guy’s Dodge Charger do a smoky burnout and a long drift for the cameras then slide sideways to a stop in front of a roadblock, well, we have to turn those systems off, don’t we? I mean, it’d look stupid if the TC modulated the burnout, the ESC controlled the drift, and the ABS made for a smooth, controlled stop… If you do what I do – drive race cars and stunt cars in film and television – you become very concerned with how to disable the anti-lock braking systems, traction control, and electronic stability control. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a study that shows that ten thousand fatal crashes would be avoided annually if all cars on the road had ESC, and has mandated that all new cars sold in the US from 2012 on must have ESC. These systems are so effective and the impact so significant that they have become the law.
The things I just described are, respectively, electronic stability control (ESC), traction control (TC), and anti-lock braking (ABS). But do you know how to brake one wheel at a time to change the yaw of a car? Do you know how to cut ignition to the engine to prevent wheelspin? Do you know how to modulate your brakes right at the threshold of traction a thousand times a second?
You know to apply the throttle, brakes, and steering progressively you know not to try to brake and steer at the same time you know to steer into a skid. Are you faster with traction control on or off? Open Road
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