Driving – Foster Runs

September 3, 2009September 3, 2009

The great French getaway!

I know that my parents and my uncle Roy will all want to know the route of our travels around France, so I enclose a quick guided tour… on the basis that I can never remember the names of places when people ask me, as has already happened this morning!

The general idea was for Kim and I to take a relaxed road trip to Limoges for Philip & Isabelle’s wedding and back again, not driving more than four hours on any of the travelling days and generally getting to experience a little more of this beautiful country.

You have almost certainly seen paintings of Giverny, as it is the home of Monet’s water garden with its glorious water lilies and low arching bridges. The village is narrow and quaint and beautiful in the evening sun. We arrived too late to visit the house and gardens so had to endure the crowds and the drizzle the following day, but it was still beautiful.

Arriving in Loches the following evening, we were slightly taken aback that the hotel looked like a house, it’s front door opening directly onto the pavement of a busy thoroughfare. We were however welcomed through the door into a hidden paradise that backed gracefully onto a canal with a park beyond… shown below from further up on the ramparts. The well-travelled owners hosted afternoon tea on the terrace and gave the assorted guests the opportunity to chat amongst themselves and to a couple of interesting local friends who had stopped by. It was a wonderful lesson in true hospitality and resulted in us dining with Katrine and Phillip, a French couple from Blois… who incidentally belong to a running club that regularly visits Lewes!

The town itself is beautiful, with its narrow streets and tall roof-lines surrounding a near impenetrable fortress of a chateau.

We wondered how the next hotel, a converted barn in Nantiat near Limoges, would compare to the opulence of Le Logis, but we were not disappointed. It is a glorious contemporary conversion of the kind that you may well like to live in yourself… well I would anyway! The quiet contemplative space is surrounded by countryside, but only a twenty minute stroll to the bustling village where the hosts cycle or walk each morning to buy croissants and bread for breakfast. Ironically this getaway is run by a couple who used to live in Burgess Hill and belong to Kim’s running club!

We had been invited to a small informal barbecue at Isabelle’s parents house the evening before the wedding and we duly turned up to find a table set for about sixty… pictured looking each way from the middle below! The caterers were excellent and the festivities went on from a glorious day and well into a cool clear evening.

The wedding was on the following day and despite a groom who looked poorly briefed about the nature and order of a French wedding (he certainly signed up to something), it was a wonderfully lighthearted and participative affair. The sixty then decamped to a local chateau for extended festivities which continued from the afternoon well into the following morning… we finally got to bed around 3am.

We spent the following day reading and relaxing in our relaxing haven and later ate in a picture postcard restaurant in nearby Bellac. This shall remain nameless as, run by another English couple, it was a lesson in how not to if ever there was one! Cheap ingredients, poorly prepared and presented and thus extortionately priced. Sorry to be frank and all!

It was always going to be hard to match the calm of Nantiat, but the studio on the hill overlooking Saumur was still quiet, despite the team of gardeners working furiously for two days to make the previously overgrown garden presentable for our departure. Saumur itself is a lovely town and is overlooked by another of France’s great defensive chateaux, which appears to be undergoing a complete restoration. Certainly the town below the ramparts has large sections of contemporary buildings in the vernacular, with a cosmopolitan cafe culture spilling out into shaded squares.

After all the other delightful accommodation we had visited during our 1026 mile road trip, we arrived late last night at the best of all: with it’s bright shower room and crisp sheets… there’s nothing like a trip away to remind you how wonderful home is!

February 8, 2009

Last weekend you trecked

You may have gathered from my post earlier this week that we disappeared off to Holland last weekend to see our friends Adam & Sandra, celebrate their son Thomas’s second birthday and deliberately surprise Thomas’s grandparents, Tim & Anna, who were also visiting.

The outgoing leg was really straightforward, with great roads right up til about half a mile from their place. The we spent a frustrating half hour following Tom-Tom as it tried in vain to get us to the new-build on roads that have either been abandoned in a large area of development, or have yet to be built!

Utrecht is a really pretty place, with a deep set canal winding through the town with its cobbled streets and wonky houses. The weather was gloriously bright & sunny and perilously cold, but it was a great introduction to what is probably well off the tourist trail for most people from the UK.

Adam & Sandra were generous hosts, putting us in mind of our friends Scott & Carolyn in Seattle. In fact both Adam & Scott LOVE their coffee, but while Scott has a really smart stainless steel cafetiere, Adam has an espresso machine that grinds beans at from the top to make totally amazing and pretty much instantanteous coffee.

Their house backs on to a canal that was frozen the whole weekend, to such an extent that Adam had been walking on it the previous week. THAT’s cold!

Most of our return trip was straightforward and we pottered back to the tunnel via some very quiet seaside villages along the French coast – one can imagine that in the summer, the glorious sandy beaches will be heaving with holiday-makers. As soon as we unloaded in the UK we realised that the weather had changed, hence the previous pictures and the additional two and a half hours it took us to get home.

But Utrecht is well work a visit!

February 2, 2009

Tyres in the snow

PLEASE can someone point out to the news agencies that the answer to their question, regarding the reason why we are apparently so unprepared for the current driving conditions, is TYRES and TRAINING.

Tyres

Scandinavian counties have snow & ice for a large proportion of each year so they have both summer tyres and winter tyres.

Their summer tyres are like ours, designed to work efficiently on tarmac in dry and wet conditions, with a lot of rubber in contact with the ground.

Come the snow, they change to narrower tyres with sharper edges and a much more blocky appearance. Less rubber in contact with the ground means that there is greater pressure exerted at each touch point, making for more grip.

Where snow and ice are compacted and last for the season, then tyres with studs are used, the titanium studs biting into the surface and giving good, but not perfect grip. These are not permitted in areas where the ground cover comes and goes as otherwise they would tear up the tarmac.

Rally cars, seeking greater grip still, use extreme studs such as those shown on my about page, designed to bite down harder into the surface to find traction.

My experience of all these tyres is that there is still not as much grip as our tyres in wet conditions, therefore something else is required to keep things moving.

Training

in Sweden, part of driver training involves driving in every season and particularly learning what happens to the car in slippery conditions.

In this country we experience real snow so infrequently that tyres are chosen for their grip in the dry and wet. Those that we use are effectively useless in snow.

Lucky people get to drive on skid-pans to experience the effect of skidding but the rest of the driving population are not trained to deal with the conditions using the equipment we have.

On the M20 last night, even before the worst of the snow came down, it was gratifying to see several less prepared or more aggressive drivers finding out how little grip they had WITHOUT hitting anything. In each case they drove onwards much more slowly.

My suggestions for the next couple of days are:

Don’t go out in the car, unless it’s to try the conditions in your local area, in which case heed the following:
Keep your speed right down. Fifteen miles per hour is FAST in the snow and CRAZY in the ice that we’re expecting tonight.
Leave plenty of space and watch what is happening ahead, to the sides and behind. Sliding cars can come from any direction and you need to be thinking how to avoid them early on, rather than assuming that they will be able to avoid you.
Be really gentle with the controls and use engine braking rather than the brakes where possible. Make sure you know whether your car has anti-lock brakes or not. Anti-lock brakes will help you stop in an emergency, but ordinary ones will need to be pumped on and off otherwise they may lock, at which point you are probably going to be out of control.
Avoid steep hills, up or down, unless they have been gritted.
If you get stuck, you can try letting your tyres down to give you more grip, but do heed the official advice and take a shovel, a blanket, a thermos a mobile phone etcetera.
And keep your eyes open for someone following you into the same situation.

August 13, 2008

What’s new on the drive this week?

My car had to go back for some remedial work which meant that my neighbours once again thought that I’d taken delivery of a new ride.

There’s a subtle difference in the way that a four-wheel-drive car corners compared to a rear-drive, which I would typify, from the very few miles I have driven this one, in two ways. First, the front tucks into the corner more quickly, almost tugging, laterally, at the nose. Second, on exit, where the steering on a rear-drive car is almost trying to get back to a central position, in the four-wheel-drive you need to take the steering angle off in a much more deliberate way. In essence, it goes exactly, quite literally, where you point it.

I would love to try it in low-grip conditions… I bet it would be awesome fun!

Other things to note: The Targa roof is gorgeous, but when it’s down it effectively obscures the view through the rear window, which is frustrating. There is a really handy hatchback, but the hips and back are so bulbous that you’d seldom use it for fear of scratching the gleaming paint. The sports exhaust is a triumph… I didn’t bother working out how to turn the radio on, just how to open the windows! If cars weren’t generally so quiet, more people would enjoy driving below the speed limit in built-up areas just to imbibe the sound!

April 24, 2008

All mud and no running

Would it surprise anyone if I said that I spent yesterday crawling around in the thick Chiltern mud? I don’t suppose so as any regular readers will know that I’m always up to my knees in the stuff.

But the main aim of yesterday was not to get too muddy, but rather bump and splosh around at an elegant ride height at least a couple of feet above the ground. Courtesy of the Land Rover Experience. The function of this truly excellent centre is to demonstrate to potential buyers the ability of this most English of Chelsea Tractor. In extremis.

I can tell you first hand that the streets of Kensington & Chelsea are cared for in a way that puts other councils to shame, with perfectly paved, level sidewalks, motorway standard tarmacking and regularly cleaned gutters. Outside of the garden squares and patio pots, mud does not feature widely.

This centre, by comparison, has an awful lot of the stuff. Deep, slippery ruts and complex cross-cuts, tracks submerged in watery mud, teflon-coated muddy grass, steep muddy inclines and dizzying drops, tree-lined forest tracks with mud mixed with roots… you name it, they have it!

I know from ice-driving in Sweden how much difference tyres make to safety so I was stunned to find out what kind they proposed to use to cope with this dictionary of muddiness: standard road tyres on all but one fairly old, green Defender. Moreover, all but the aforementioned were completely standard vehicles in every aspect.

During the day I got to drive the green Defender through the very worst of the mud and deep water, a Range Rover down through the forest trail (avoiding all but three of the myriad tennis balls suspended strategically from the trees), a new silver Defender round a typical time trial section with awkward gates, tricky changes in camber and surface and the very worst of the ruts and cross-cuts (Penny and Pete will know what I mean) and a Range Rover Sport out on the road.

To prove how truly amazing these vehicles are, we persuaded the team to let us drive the final vehicle, an £80k Range Rover Vogue TDSE, not out on the road as planned, but over some extreme bumps and at some fairly radical angles both sideways and endways. I’m pretty comfortable driving most anything, but we were at such an angle sideways at one point that I thought I was going to fall out of my seat!

I was so enthralled that I completely forgot to take any pictures, but late in the day I caught a short video. Watch the horizon very carefully to get a sense of what we were doing in a perfectly controlled way, in beautifully appointed comfort. the-drop.mp4

All-in-all a totally mud-tastic day!

February 16, 2008

Dessert

After all the serious fun… there was a day of ice-karting!

Last year I won the ice-karting and could have written loads of stuff about it.

This year I came third so I’ve not much to say for myself.

Except that I didn’t start using the brakes until we were messing around after the final. That’s when I started to remember how to go quickly! DUH!

Tracks in the UK would be unfamiliar with the concept of letting the punters carry on driving, round and round, until they actually get tired of driving. Or it gets dark. Which in our case happened around the same time! In fact, at one point Benny even re-started us in the other direction so that it would be more challenging!

The casualty of the day was my boot, which now has a radically remodelled sole… on account of me trying to warm my feet up by putting them too close to the fire! It actually took an hour in the jacuzzi and ten minutes in the sauna for me to feel my toes again at the end of the day. And a large G&T, a terrific bottle of wine and another evening of hilarious conversation to stop smarting about losing!

I must work on that!

February 16, 2008

Nice ‘n icy

A couple of busy days later, I finally find time to upload a couple or three photos of the lake at Alvdalen. But it’s time for bed so I’ll have to fill in the details later!

And here are the details.

After another four-thirty alarm, I drove to Stansted in the pouring rain, left my car with a delighted parking attendant and checked in. And all before coffee, which I find remarkable. My traveling companions were Mark and Mike, both IT consultants and David, a dentist: all easily identifiable as fanatics by the stack of car mags in their bags.

We flew in to Skavsta, which is to the south-west of Stockholm and picked up our hire car: a Saab 95 2.0t estate, which by the way, is an excellent car with a whole lot of space. With four trained drivers, the journey north to Alvdalen was very pleasant, but contrary to previous years, the roads were largely tarmac coloured. I managed to get the graveyard shift at the end, which although only 45 minutes out of an almost six hour trip, was had by far the most interesting conditions. Here the roads were white and it was now dark, but the car was capable and we made good progress to the hotel.

At the hotel were the other three members of our group, Simon, Richard and Victoria, but also the previous group of friends which made for an excellent evening full of discursive conversation. Also present were our host and trainers from Volvo: Bert, Jerry and Tomas basically think we’re weird as, despite meeting a large number of highly committed drivers and test-drivers every year, we are apparently the only group that can spend the evenings discussing steering methods or the optimal order in which to train novice drivers in advanced driving techniques.

Out on the ice the next day, they were also surprised. They expect a very high standard of driving from this group, but despite having four ‘ice wirgins’, they didn’t have to pull a single car out of the bank in the whole day.

I should explain: we are on both a test track and a lake (with a frozen surface about half a metre thick), which are to all intents and purposes, low grip. Not slippery enough that you have to fight for balance (although Victoria did slip over a couple of times) but enough that you will stand stock still with your wheels spinning beneath you if you are too boisterous with the gas on take-off. The tracks are created at the beginning of the season by compacting the snow and they are then lovingly cleared, groomed and tended-to by Benny each night, much like a piste, so that all the car makers, tyre manufacturers and test drivers using the track have optimal conditions.

The exercises we were doing were designed to challenge our control over the cars, pushing us to experience cornering, braking and avoiding obstacles at relatively high speeds. The winter tyres that the Swedes use are studded in the main, which is a very good thing: the reason that the UK grinds to a halt in an inch of snow is because we drive on summer tyres – in northern European terms, these are the prevalent conditions that we face.

With summer tyres, a corner that might be comfortable on studs at 40mph would only be possible at 10mph without a loss of control. I know from experience that in very low grip conditions (on Mira wet-grip test-track) I can drive my car neatly round a corner at 10mph or slide it sideways under control at 12-15mph, but I am totally out of control at 17mph… the window is a really small one! The problems really start to pile up for someone driving in UK snow when they think that sufficient grip extends beyond about 10mph… or beyond an almost horizontal gradient!

During the course we get to drive a mixture of front-wheel’, rear-wheel’ and four-wheel drive cars and learn how to drive each to its strengths. The biggest grin factor for me has changed over the last couple of years. It was always the rear-wheel drive cars that gave me the greatest satisfaction and though it was a real hoot guiding the limousine around our little track sideways (it has such a long wheelbase that everything happens really slowly, making for some really graceful arcs), this year the four-wheel drive cars got me hooked.

Volvo’s new V70 and especially XC70 are absolutely marvellous cars and very quick with it!

But there’s a common misperception, which is that because four-wheel drive cars accelerate more quickly in low-grip conditions, they also brake more quickly and corner at higher speeds. Alas, it’s the same old rubber at each corner whether you have the latest 4×4 or a… pedal car. Same old limit of grip to expend on either cornering or braking, or some lessened combination of the two. Sure, in the safety of our one-way track, we can slide the car sideways into each corner and neatly power out. But this surface is much more forgiving than even wet tarmac… and in the dry the speed at which the car can bite back, if you get it wrong, increases significantly!

Which brings us back to steering techniques, although I don’t begin to have enough space here to even start that discussion again!

February 13, 2008

Sheet!

Okay okay OKAY! I go away occasionally… and occasionally I go away again! But I’m back now, so I’ll be running again very soon!

In the meantime, I thought you may be interested in my latest annual Swedish pilgrimage to worship at the alter named VCDA: The Volvo Cars Driving Academy. (I hope you can read Swedish!)

I’ll write more about it later, but I just saw this photo from the route home and thought I’d whet your appetite.

It was an interesting morning, conditions-wise with roads so slippery that at one point when I tested the brakes in a safe place, the wheels locked and we shot along like a bobsleigh. It was so slippery that the anti-lock brakes were fooled into thinking we were stationery and didn’t kick in until we had almost slowed to a halt under our own weight. Although we were in our Saab hire car, to be fair!

You might notice that in the photo above, Mark seems to be standing gingerly and holding on to the car… yes, it really was that slippery! You can actually see his reflection in the road!

So I particularly wanted to thank Jerry who, on an earlier course, insisted on teaching us how to power-turn a front-wheel drive car. At the time he described the situation we had found ourselves in perfectly: having finally run out of traction on a narrow hill. Steering on full lock, engage reverse, let out the clutch and blip the throttle; then straighten the wheels as the car finishes a graceful pivot around its rear wheels.

Watching the highlights of that day’s Swedish Rally, it was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones finding the conditions challenging!