We use a lot of metaphors here at Ride Drive, as we find they are very useful when putting a point across as they help people to visualise what we are talking about, and the following is a good example of how well this works.

Take one freshly hatched conker (Horse Chestnut), drill a neat hole through its centre and thread it onto a piece of string of about 2-feet in length.  Knot the string at one end and allow the conker to slide to the knot whilst holding the other end in one hand. If you now whirl the conker around over the top of your head like a helicopter rotor the string will remain taught, and the faster you whirl the more stressed the string becomes.  The question is, does the conker pull on the string or does the string pull on the conker?

To get to the answer to the riddle ask yourself what would happen to the conker if the string snapped, or if you let it go?  The conker would no longer orbit the top of your head, but would fly outwards on a straight-line course away from the circle that it just been drawing in the air, converting straight away to a path that is set at a tangent to that circle. That change to a straight course occurs at exactly the point where the conker is released from the force that it making it travel in a circle and it will head towards whatever direction it was facing at that moment.

Every inanimate object on the planet, when subjected to acceleration, will travel in a straight line unless it is subjected to an interfering force that acts upon that object to change its direction.  In the case of our conker it will fly off in a direction that is at a tangent to the circular path it came from, but it will travel in a circular path only if pulled in that direction by the string. The string therefore represents the interfering force, but how does this have any relevance to you driving your car?

Accepting that cars do not have a mind of their own any more than does any other solid object, and they do not experience emotions, it does help us to understand better if we imagine they do, and with that in mind we can say that objects are always happiest when travelling in a straight line, because a straight path is the line of travel that nature always intended for them.

When you ask the car to go around a bend you are asking it to perform an unnatural act, which then requires an amount of effort that is stronger than the desire of that vehicle to keep going straight ahead. When you drive a bend your tyres are the conker string and the car the conker, so that if you try and negotiate that corner too quickly your conker string may snap, or slip from your grasp, releasing it from the only force that is making it steer away from a naturally straight course.  This means that we are restricted to cornering only at a rate that is within the breaking strain of our string, or within our ability to keep hold of it, if we are to successfully emerge on the other side of the bend.

If you are not convinced of this concept, then think of this scenario.  If you put a tennis ball in the centre of your passenger foot well, and the car was level enough for it to be able to remain there whilst you are driving along at a constant speed and in a straight line, the ball will travel with the car in the same direction and at the same speed. However, you will be aware that if you steer into a left hand bend you can expect the ball to begin to roll, but which way does it go?

If the car is travelling at 30mph towards the North, then the tennis ball in the middle of your foot well is also travelling at 30mph to the North, but that is its speed relative to the road surface. If we are talking about the relationship the ball has within its mini-environment, i.e. the interior of the car, then it is remaining stationary. If you now apply the brakes, and because the ball is free to move, it will continue to travel to the North at 30mph. Here the ball begins to leave the car behind, due to the car reducing its speed, but the visual effect we have within the car is that the ball has begun to roll forward. It is only once it has been stopped from doing so, by coming up against the end of the foot well, it is only then that it is forced to decelerate at the same rate as the car in which it is being carried.

Now apply this theory to a car that is steering into a corner. When the car steers to the left the ball actually appears to roll to the right, but in reality it has remained on the original course of straight ahead. It has only rolled to the right relative to its relationship with the car, and appears to roll in that direction only because the car has changed its orientation in that it has rotated about its axis to the left. The ball in reality will roll forward relative to the ground beneath the car, until it meets with some obstruction, such as your centre console or transmission tunnel, and when this occurs that obstruction will capture the ball and take it around the bend with the rest of the car.