What are the advantages of turning off T/C?

[Synner]

Basically but so far launch control has only proven to be slower than driving properly and will break your axles or spider gears. Stick to old school or find a launch control in a car that doesn't weigh 2 tons with lots of wheel hop.

And its not the rev limiter, hitting that will slow your run considerably.

[GaBoy25]

I thought the car launched at 42-4300 rpm.

[Norm Peterson]

Originally Posted by GaBoy25

Let me know when you see the car I'm racing....I didn't

OK, there wasn't any other car, so I guess you win the battle of semantics. But you'll have to admit that the intensity of that exhibition was right up there with side-by-side street racing.

I'm inclined to put down what happened as being similar to a "red mist" road course track day error, where the sensations and excitement of the moment cloud your normally better judgment. It happens, so recognizing the symptoms quickly is kind of important.


I'm honestly glad that you took a very positive lesson away from that incident.

If it helps you stick to your promise to yourself, the last smoky burnout I did was over 45 years ago.



Norm

[GaBoy25]

Originally Posted by Norm Peterson

OK, there wasn't any other car, so I guess you win the battle of semantics. But you'll have to admit that the intensity of that exhibition was right up there with side-by-side street racing.

I'm inclined to put down what happened as being similar to a "red mist" road course track day error, where the sensations and excitement of the moment cloud your normally better judgment. It happens, so recognizing the symptoms quickly is kind of important.


I'm honestly glad that you took a very positive lesson away from that incident.

If it helps you stick to your promise to yourself, the last smoky burnout I did was over 45 years ago.



Norm

I agree 100%

Thanks for the understanding. I wasn't being a braggart; quiet the opposite.

[wadeh]

Originally Posted by Synner

I love how people think there was never a performance vehicle before the advent of nannies and driving without them means you will wreck. The only thing nannies do is allow poor drivers to operate vehicles that they lack the skills to operate safety. When people say "never drive with them off" all I hear is "I should be driving a civic."

A good driver knows how to handle oversteer, understeer, locked brakes, limited traction and other situations where the nannies step in. They also learn and understand the limits of their vehicle. The people who never better themselves as drivers or learn their vehicles need nannies. Safety margins are located within the driver brain, hands, and feet. No nanny can fix that.

Assuming that this is directed at me, I never said that driving without electronic aids "means you will wreck".

I have many hundreds of thousands of miles of experience in high performance vehicles, lots of them without this technology. And while I've never auto crossed, I do have track experience and have had training in high performance driving. I am quite capable of recovering from the conditions mentioned in this thread.

What I did say, and what I stand behind, is that modern electronic aids add a margin of safety, and do so without impeding driving on public streets. If you are regularly activating Stabilitrak in your day to day driving, then I would suggest you're not doing it right.

If you want to push the car to it's limits without interference (and let's face it, lots of us do, including me), go for it. That's what the off switch is for. But you'll have a hard time convincing me that it's appropriate to do so on public streets.

[Norm Peterson]

Outside of specific accident/incident avoidance maneuvers I'm afraid that there isn't much in street driving or laps around the big track that compares to autocross in terms of how busy you are. And those are over and done with in a handful of seconds, vs typical run times in the 40 - 50 second range for most autocrosses around here. The lateral and longitudinal g's on a road course may be similar, but at autocross the turns and transients are all but right on top of each other. The 65 mph slalom runs through the truck tire debris is the closest approximation in street driving to autocross that I've ever encountered in nearly 50 years of driving.


I can look back over that same length of time and find at most only two incidents where a ST-nanny might have mitigated the situation. Emphasis on the words "might have", since in both situations tire grip simply wasn't there for it to work with either. About 43 years ago for one (curb strike involving snow), and maybe 35 for the other (gravel/marbles off-line on a back-country road, dry, I lifted just a little when I probably shouldn't have). Neither involved any injury.

modern electronic aids add a margin of safety

About here is where the unspoken implications behind every cautionary advice to leave the nannies active in street driving comes in. The implied presumptions are that sooner or later everybody will need this assistance, does need to have a warm and fuzzy feeling simply because they're there, and that they should be forced (or at least strongly urged) to use them over their own reasonable judgment not to. Those thoughts may not have been intended, but's unavoidably how the advice is perceived. And that's what I (and probably others) disagree with.

The flip side here is that if you aren't needing these assistances, they aren't helping you any. And if it's been over a sufficiently long time where they either weren't available or not appropriately activated, you would have legitimate claim to not need them at all. Yes, I suppose it does come down to individual risk tolerance, though with sufficient experience without nannies you're better equipped to determine where the line between acceptable and unacceptable risk lies. (And no matter how strongly anybody hopes/dreams otherwise and develops still more nannies in response, there will always be risk involved in driving any motor vehicle.)

I think that since the vast majority of the combined time that my wife and I have been driving has been without stability control (well over 90% of our 93-ish total years) we've got enough basis to not need it. Hell, over 75% of our driving experience has been without even ABS.

So for anybody to even suggest that I should leave the nannies active comes off in the same tone as suggesting that I need to put these things



on my 26" / 21-speed Cannondale.


No personal flame intended.


Norm