4WD EXPEDITIONS · Comp Truck Craft

WHEEL PLACEMENT AND WEIGHT TRANSFER ON EXTREME TERRAIN

13 min · Full library · written from fifteen years in the terrain

The point

After this lesson you can place a tyre you cannot see, read how load is moving around your vehicle, and pick lines on ledges, side slopes and cross-axle terrain based on physics rather than nerve.

Half the answer, free

The Technique

  1. Begin with the problem: from the driver's seat you cannot see any of your four tyres, and the ground under them is the only thing that matters. Solving this is about building reference points. Sit in your normal driving position, have someone place a marker on the ground, and creep forward until your front tyre is exactly on it. Now look at where that marker appears relative to your bonnet line, your wiper, your mirror, the corner of the windscreen. That relationship is fixed for you in that seat in that vehicle. Repeat it for the left front, the right front, and then for the rears using your mirrors and the position of the rear door line. After an hour of this you stop guessing. This is the single exercise that separates drivers who look precise from drivers who look lucky, and it works because human spatial memory is good at fixed visual relationships and terrible at abstract estimation.
  2. Then extend it to where the tyre will be, not where it is. Driving is prediction. When you turn the wheel, the front tyres track outside or inside the path of the bonnet depending on direction and steering angle, and the rear tyres cut inside the front track by an amount set by wheelbase. On a tight rutted track this is why people put a rear wheel over an edge they cleared with the front. The fix is to consciously aim wide on the front so the rears track through the good ground, and on long wheelbase vehicles to make that allowance much bigger than instinct suggests. Practise this on a marked line on flat ground before you need it on a shelf road with a drop on one side.
Still under the glass
  • Place a tyre you cannot see, and read how weight transfer decides which wheel actually has grip
  • 7 more technique steps
  • The 5 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
  • The drill that builds the reflex
  • The safety non-negotiables

It opens when you book a trip that runs 4wd expeditions - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.

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These sports kill people. Not rarely, and not only the reckless - every season they kill riders who were experienced, fit, well equipped and doing everything properly. That is the honest starting position and everything else we do sits on top of it.

The mountain does not know who you are. Snow releases on people with twenty years in it. Machines roll on riders who have done that line a hundred times. Water, rock, trees and other people are indifferent to how good you have become. Every time you go out you are accepting a real chance that it goes wrong, and no amount of skill removes that chance - it only changes the odds.

What that looks like in these disciplines, plainly: avalanche burial and asphyxiation, being crushed under a machine, head and spinal injuries from falls and impacts, drowning, hypothermia, and collisions with trees, rocks and other riders.

We work in remote country, so distance is part of it. A serious injury usually means hours before a helicopter can reach you, and weather sometimes means no helicopter at all. Help being close is not a feature of any trip we run.

This is exactly why we prepare the way we do. Training before you ride, gear standards, minimum party sizes, people who know the ground, and a willingness to call a day off. All of it is about improving your odds and making the group capable of looking after itself. None of it makes anything safe, none of it makes anyone competent, and passing our training is not a qualification. Anybody who tells you they can make this safe is selling something.

Everyone out there is relying on everyone else having been honest about what they can actually do. If reading this has made you hesitate, that is worth listening to rather than talking yourself out of.

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