5 Things You Should Never Do In A Rear-Wheel Drive Car

1. Don't mash the throttle while turning

This is especially common for people who’ve come out of front-wheel drive cars and suddenly find themselves with a lot of power and no idea about how it deploys differently. In FWD cars, if you give it too much throttle you’ll understeer - fix this by lifting off the throttle and you should pull back onto line without much fuss.

If you’ve got any sort of lock on, you’re pushing the car’s weight to the outside of the tyres. If you then mash the right pedal the amount of grip available will be lower than normal, and you’re going to lose traction - in a RWD car, that means the back end is gong on an adventure. That’s when you need to start feathering the throttle to bring the car back under control, and that’s not something most people do instinctively. What most people do do is snap their foot off the throttle and then brake, which is an excellent way to lose control. Which brings us nicely to…

2. When breaking traction, don't brake or lift sharply off the throttle

Remember when we talked about ways to initiate a drift? Most of those techniques involved un-gripping your rear tyres and shifting weight; here, again, we’re talking about working with the weight of the car to keep it under control.

If you’re pulling a burnout or have found yourself oversteering, lifting sharply off the throttle might be your natural reaction, but it’ll lift the weight off the rears and provide even less grip than you already had. If you brake you’re just exacerbating this issue, and you’ll find yourself spinning out before you even know what’s happened.

Instead, you should avoid hitting the brakes until you’re straight, instead easing off the throttle to minimise the effects of the weight transfer, and bringing the wheels back to grip in a manageable way.

This is kind of a given for any car you care about, but it can have particularly disastrous consequences in a rear-wheel drive car. The idea of heel-and-toe downshifts is to match the engine speed to the wheel speed, which in turn keeps the car stable by removing any jolts from the transmission.

If you downshift too early, the rear wheels will lock up, which has the same effect as yanking the handbrake. Want a visual representation of that? Our very own CTzen Chris DedicationBlog accidentally shifted to 2nd at 90mph, and caught the whole thing on video. Heel-and-toe probably wouldn’t have saved him here, but use this as an example of what can happen, even to experienced drivers like Chris.

4. Don't pull the handbrake without depressing the clutch

This one’s extremely important for all-wheel drive cars, but it certainly ain’t a healthy thing to do in rear-wheel drive cars either. It’s quite logical really, but if it’s never crossed your mind you could unwittingly be putting a lot of strain on the transmission and engine by not disengaging the clutch when you pull the handbrake.

Obviously, the handbrake’s job is to slow the rear wheels, so if you don’t depress the clutch then the transmission and engine will be under heavy load trying to fight the handbrake to turn the wheels. You probably won’t break anything unless you leave the handbrake on for extended periods, but it’s not good for your car.

5. Don't go out in the snow without suitable tyres

Again, this should be a general rule no matter which wheels your car sends power to, but you’re most likely to be stranded in rear-wheel drive. If you don’t fit winter tyres to your four-wheel drive vehicle, at least you have the power evenly distributed to scrabble for whatever grip is available, and with front-wheel drive, front-engined cars the weight tends to be over the front wheels, aiding grip.

Rear-wheel drive cars typically have less weight over the driven wheels, meaning you’ll just end up doing pretty pirouettes without going anywhere near where you actually want to be going.