Wow, this
EXACT same thing happened to me a long time ago. I mean down to the steering, direction, stalling, and final position. I mean EVERYTHING. The only difference was that I was on an actual street, and I was sitting on the left and side rather than the left.
What happened to me was I was running on a straight similar to the video at a pretty good clip (arguably a little too fast :redface
I then hit a slight bend and a traffic light that was red. Ordinarily it would have required a pretty hard stop with a mild turn. However, there was a massive amount of sprinkler water run off in the middle of the road a little before the bend. I knew at the speed I was going this was going to be trouble. I hit the brakes firmly but not enough to lock up; I was still going straight at the time. As soon as I passed right over the water, I could tell I lost traction in the tires. The same thing appears to be happening in the video as well. Right at the 31 second mark, it looks like he’s slipping while still straight. After that, either the car naturally wanted to spin right, or the wheels were slightly cocked right so as soon as the rear lost traction, the car just immediately wanted to spin right. If you watch very closely and in slow motion, you’ll see the car start to aggressively spin even though he’s hasn’t moved steering wheel position at all. The same happened to me as I was either center wheel position or just barely right of center. As soon as I hit that patch of water and I felt the car loose traction, the back end immediately wanted to pull the car around even though I didn’t even touch the position of the steering wheel. The best way I can describe it is if I pinned the front of the car down on a pivot but kept pushing on the back. The back felt like it wanted to swing around being pushed around on that pivot point. When I counter steered, just like in the video, I did the same sideways action, just like in the video. Then ironically, I did the reverse steering, just like in the video to swing the car back to a 180 position. I know clearly it was the incorrect thing to do, but for some reason, the body instinctively wanted to do it and the driver in the video for some reason did the same. Also I stalled out the car at about the same point.
I’m not entirely sure if the downshifting caused the tires to lose traction (it’s very inconclusive in the video), but it’s clear that the driver did lose control and that the water was a key factor. I think he just hit the turn with too much speed for the conditions and the video demonstrates the NSX key advantage and disadvantage of having a mid engine design. The same principles that allow the NSX to corner to adeptly also allow it to spin immediately when losing tire traction. The bottom line is that be very careful when driving the NSX in wet or unexpected conditions. The NSX gets very twitchy in those conditions much more than any other car I’ve driven (I’m thinking a Porsche could be as bad???
). So unless you Billy Johnson :wink:, chances are you are going to get into these snap spins if you are going too fast and need to brake hard.
