Wishing for a Transforming Esprit

As much as we’d like to own a James Bond The Spy Who Loved Me transforming Lotus Esprit, we’ll have to be content with our everyday Fords or Hondas.  If there’s no choice but to run your car through a flood, then do so—but make sure that your car could do it first! 

Cars with high ground clearance such as an F150 may skip this section, but for the lesser mortals read on. 

The key here is to keep engine revs high enough to prevent water from entering the exhaust pipe.  Engines need to breathe, so think of the exhaust as the car’s nose rather than its ass.  For manual transmission, the trick is to hang the car’s clutch putting in as much revs as your redline would allow while keeping the overall speed and pace slow.  Going through floodwaters too fast isn’t beneficial to the car as doing so may cause a bigger ripple to open up and this may sometimes cause water to reach vital engine systems such as the belts and electrical causing the car to stall at the worse possible moment—I should know, it happened to me once. 

Cars with autoboxes have no choice but to engage the low position and try to see the flood through.  Although the best for autoboxes would be to avoid flood wading at all costs. 

Keep your speed to a walking rate and you should see the flood through.  In case you have to turn back because the water levels are higher than you thought—forget it.  Reversing or doing tight maneuvers are not advisable in these conditions.  You’d run a bigger risk stalling on the maneuver than you stalling by going straight.  Better plow through rather than chicken out.  As brutal as it seems, this is the only way.  Remember, you got yourself into this sticky situation in the first place. 

Driving tips mentioned here are just the simple basics.  Even for the most learned of drivers, it doesn’t do harm to read new material about the subject of proper driving techniques.  Remember that car technology changes and sometimes the way to drive them could change.   Refresher courses are beneficial as it could give new tips or improve on old diehard driving habits. 

Though the value of our daily drivers isn’t even enough to pay for Michael Schumacher’s custom made Bridgestone rubber, the fact that you appear to be as every bit as informed and prepared as the great World Championship himself when it comes to proper wet weather driving could prevent you from getting pushed to the sidelines of the race called life.  In the end, we all deserve to be Schumachers, not Yoongs.

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