Manchester RoADAR organised a skid pan training session at the Staffordshire Police training facility at Hixon. The silver car is a rear wheel drive Sierra, the red car is a front-wheel drive Focus. The tyres are slicks, created by sending tyres away to have a special compound added to fill in the treads, and they are then inflated to twice normal pressure on the car. The skid pan is constantly fed with collected and recycled rainwater from jets around the side, and then collected in the central drain, filtered and pumped back into the main tank. Biodegradeable oil is manually added to the surface. This combination means that although the cars are driven in second gear at no more than around 15mph, the exaggerated skid effects are comparable to those at 30-40mph in a normal car. The front wheel drive car was much easier to control and correct, and you can see from the videos that it was able to drive around a lot quicker. I learnt a lot from the day and it was great fun! Many thanks to Manchester RoADAR for organising it, and to Rob and Steve at Staffordshire Police for their excellent training.
There are some 3gp videos available at http://holosys.co.uk/hixon_skidpan/ although they are not good quality. Right-click and use "Save Target As" to download them.
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