Well, sorry for taking a while to respond.
Strangely Brown wrote:If I read the above correctly: on the approach to a bend, you leave your gear change late and THEN you brake firmly.
What's wrong with this picture?
May I clarify, I'm not leaving the gear changes late on purpose, it's more a case of I think to myself:
"ooh, best change down, a bend is approaching, gear change done and dusted, wait I'm a bit too close to the bend going a bit too quickly, better brake! Maybe a bit harder, now I'm going at a speed where I can brake within the surprise horizon."
That's the thought process that happens. I try to avoid having my foot on the brake at the same time as having the clutch pushed in, and prefer to only do that when absolutely necessary (i.e, gear I'm in won't let me slow down enough to turn into a side road).
I'm not doing it intentionally, and it's more a case of I've misjudged how much time I've got.
TripleS wrote:As for hard braking being used as a matter of course, well I don't think that's a good style to be adopting, as sooner or later one might find that it isn't going to be enough to avoid a shunt. For most driving I prefer to have a good margin of spare braking or cornering capacity to allow for the sort of misjudgements we can all make at times.
Best wishes all,
Dave.
I do try to avoid hard/strong braking. It may be I meant firm braking. I'm not standing the car on its nose every time I get near the pedal.
I'm clearly not doing justice to my driving
It's hard to convey the experience of being a passenger when I'm driving in text.
Just so you're all aware, I'm not driving at the limit. Every time I've cocked up, the car seems to be perfectly within its limits, it's just the ABS that I'm unintentionally activating. As a comparison, I've only activated the traction control on the Yeti once, whilst I was a learner, because I was in a muddy field and accidentally put too much pressure on the accelerator when attempting to pull away.
Gareth wrote:]
- Are you driving the electronics or are you driving the car?
- Are you using the ABS to allow you to drive faster into potentially hazardous situations?
- How much safety margin do you think you should allow, in case of driver error or unforeseen circumstances?
- I'm effectively pushing some electronic buttons which give me the impression of being control of a vehicle when I'm not due to the computer having the power to take over from me at any moment without warning. (Best put my tinfoil hat on).
- I'm not using the ABS as an excuse to allow myself to drive faster into potentially hazardous situations. I just seem to have had more occasions of it activating when I've had to do emergency stops, or brake heavily.
- As much as is necessary in order to make sure that my mistakes remain mistakes, rather than catastrophic multi-vehicle smashes.
Mr Cholmondeley-Warner wrote:Insanity, what tyres has your car got on? How old / worn are they?
The rears are whatever tyres were on the car when we bought it (I think Continentals). They were put on brand new as part of the sale. They're getting pretty close to the limit now, and are approaching two years old. They'll be changed at the next service (in about 2k miles). The front tyres are some little known (most likely Chinese) brand which the garage fitted when we asked them to replace the front tyres due to them getting close to the limit (about 20k miles ago, or a year ago).
I can also tell you guys that maybe 4 or 5 incidents of the dozen or so activations I've had with the ABS were actually due to me having to brake and put 2 wheels on to a muddy verge because of someone coming the other way on a single track road. So in actual fact, even fewer than a dozen of the ABS activations were due to me braking hard enough to warrant its activation in a situation of sort.
Sorry for the long post. Also, I've typed this in one go without planning anything so if anything doesn't make sense, please point it out.