4WD EXPEDITIONS · Comp Truck Craft

WHEEL PLACEMENT AND WEIGHT TRANSFER ON EXTREME TERRAIN

13 min · Full library · written lesson, video in production

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

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