Five cars that are famous for doing skids

Sunday, 2 September 2018

See the Abarth 124 Spider dance in this film by fashion photographer Rankin and cinematographer Thomas C Miller.

Modern performance cars are so grown-up, right? Well yes, most of them are. But a select few combine a sense of maturity with technology designed specifically to help the driver achieve 'power oversteer'.

That's a grown-up term for 'big skids'. Which you should only do on closed roads and/or track days of course. Got that? Okay, here are five cars that can be quite a lot of fun.

Abarth 124 Spider

The Mazda MX-5 is a truly great sports car: light, simple and rear-wheel drive. We love it.

**READ MORE:

* Watch: Abarth 124 has the X-factor

* BMW M5 is softly, softly… slam you

BMW M5 is xDrive, but you can switch to '2WD' mode. Sounds grown-up. It isn't.

* What would Grandad think of the E 63+?**

However, it's not that great at going sideways on the throttle because it has quite modest power and torque outputs and nothing on the rear axle to help it break loose.

Fiat has addressed these matters in its re-engineered version of the MX-5, the Abarth 124 Spider. It has a much more grunty turbocharged engine and, crucially, a mechanical limited-slip differential that stops either of the driven wheels spinning precious power away when traction is lost. Result: instant oversteer.

Focus RS has the same rear-axle tech as the Commodore V6. So ask your Holden dealer why the ZB can't do this.

BMW M5

You could argue that the sole reason for the road-car division of BMW Motorsport to exist is to create rear-drive cars that go sideways around a circuit.

Mercedes-AMG is not shy: it calls this Drift Mode. Not sure why.

But with the explosion of power and torque that's come with the latest models like the M5 (445kW/750Nm), the M-boffins have deemed it prudent to add AWD to the chassis equation. You know, so you can drive the kids to school without shredding the rear tyres and spinning into a lamp post.

Fear not: the M5 still has a '2WD' mode, which sounds quite harmless but is actually there specifically for oversteer antics. It's not a mere push-and-play scenario: there are iDrive menus to negotiate. Which is probably just as well.

Ford Focus RS

Ferrari 812 Superfast is superskiddy and superscary, so it has trick steering to help you oversteer.

Ah yes, the laugh-out-loud RS. Ford's hyper-hatch employs a twin-clutch rear axle with torque vectoring (it's actually the same basic hardware used in the ZB Holden Commodore V6, albeit turned up to 11) to offer drivers something literally called 'Drift mode'. It employs all kinds of tricks to let you go harder and faster sideways and yes, it really is intended for track use only - at least that's what the dashboard tells you when you hit the big-skids button.

Calling this setup Drift mode must have seemed pretty cool in the product-planning stage, but it actually got Ford into lots of trouble in nanny-nation Australia, where organisations like the Pedestrian Council of Australia (yes, they sound like fun) demanded it be banned from sale immediately. Didn't happen luckily. Nor has the entire nation been wiped out by out-of-control Focus hatchbacks.

Mercedes-AMG E 63

If you want to know why the BMW M5 has a 2WD mode, it's because of this car. Mercedes-AMG got to market first with this new-gen super-sedan formula: an overpowered (450kW/850Nm) executive-excess model with a chassis tamed by 4Matic four-wheel drive - but with an oversteer-on-demand mode tucked away in its software.

Unlike BMW, Mercedes-AMG is not in the least bit shy about this technology. Where BMW calls it '2WD', AMG just comes out with it and slaps 'Drift Mode' on the dashboard when it's activated.

Indeed, the E 63 came out just after the Focus RS but nobody in Australia seemed to care about its potentially anti-social nature. Proves what we've always suspected: you can do pretty much whatever you want when you drive a super-expensive Mercedes.

Ferrari 812 Superfast

To be honest, a Ferrari 812 Superfast doesn't need any help going sideways. It's a V12-powered rear-drive coupe with 588kW/718Nm and, well, it's a Ferrari.

However, you might need a little help getting it back again, which is where the Prancing Horse's Ferrari Power Oversteer (FPO) technology comes in. Because it's the first Ferrari to have electronic power steering, the brand's boffins have been able to engineer the steering wheel to give you little hints on how to hold and recover a slide with the proper finesse required of such a vehicle.

Failing that, the Superfast is also available with a sophisticated telemetry system. So you can review the data and see at exactly which point you completely lost it.