Amount of weight on drive wheels a key to ‘snowbility’

This article is again another demonstration of why people who are in too much of a hurry should not be allowed to drive. As a friend of mine said recently, “ It is that they just hop in their SUV, point in the direction and hit the accelerator. Then they are surprised when they hit the breaks and start spinning.” The sad thing is that this is the way most people drive. Take some hints from the article.

Look outside. If you see a white blob where your car should be, stop reading now, and head outside with a shovel.
No, wait. First read this, from Puzzled Reader (not her real name): “All around me,” she wrote (I’m paraphrasing here), “I see people zipping effortlessly through the snow, while my delightful Ford Ranger gets stuck every other block. “I thought trucks were good in snow. How can I join that mobile throng?”

You need a combination of will, new tires, judgment, faith and a handful of no-cost hints Street Beat will hereby impart. Keep reading even if you don’t have a pickup, because they’re applicable to nearly all vehicles.

Puzzled Reader’s truck, we verified, is two-wheel drive. So is Street Beat’s, and we’re at a disadvantage in winter.

One of the things that determines “snowbility” is the amount of weight on the drive wheels. On our trucks, the drive wheels are in the rear, and when a pickup is empty, its rear wheels typically support less than 40 percent of its weight.

Front-wheel drive cars, for comparison, might have 60 percent of their weight over the driving wheels; on four-wheel drives, of course, it’s 100 percent.

You can’t change the design of the vehicle, but you can load it down a little. Home Depot and other places sell tubes of “car sand,” more durable than paper sandbags, that you can toss in the “wayback” (or in the trunk of a rear-wheel-drive car).

The weight will cost you a little mileage, but it improves traction. I have two tubes, about 60 pounds apiece, in the bed of my truck, and it helps.

Additional tips:
* Nothing goes without saying, but if anything did, it would be that you need good tires in winter. Real snow tires are better for max traction than “all season” types, and for the back of a pickup, I like studded snows. I’ve had to dig myself out twice in the current series of storms, but in the five years before that, no problems.
* Thursday, with Reno roads still a dismaying maze of ruts, ridges and pitfalls, we watched three consecutive cars get stuck in front of the Reno Gazette-Journal office. All three drivers did the same thing: They stopped with their tires in an icy, glazed-over dip between two gelid hillocks. When the light turned green, the tires spun fruitlessly.
Tip: Wherever you stop, including in a parking spot, think about your tires. Put the drive wheels (those troublemakers again) on dry pavement, wet pavement or snow, in that order, in preference to ice. Even a few inches of traction might let you get up enough momentum to bump over a berm.
* Remember the Egg Analogy.

One of the things new racers learn in driving school is to make control inputs as gently as possible.

Former Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart used to say you should drive so smoothly that a person riding shotgun couldn’t feel the transitions between acceleration and braking, or right turn to left.

In slippery conditions, when traction’s at a premium, that’s even more important. Sudden movements can start you sliding. Do everything as though there were an egg between your hands or feet and the controls.

* If you have to go around Second Street north of Washoe Medical Center this week, be careful. To accommodate construction of a hospital tower, that’s been changed from one-way to two-way. Nobody’s accustomed to the new traffic flow, and the lines on the pavement have been buried in snow since the conversion, so nobody knows what to do. You’re likely to see anything, including ambulances, moving more or less at random.

Copyright © 2005 The Reno Gazette-Journal