I can see this thread heading downhill so I'm going to bow out. But before I do I'll leave you with another story, which some of you might find amusing (or possibly offensive) as well as interesting.
When I was young and stupid I had far too little supervision and too much testosterone. And so I wrecked a lot of street cars by going too fast on public roads. They were all single car accidents and I was never injured since I had the good sense to wear a seatbelt (this was the 80's, so it was actually uncommon) and I endeavored to avoid doing it in trafficked areas. The cars were nothing fancy, but that makes it even more relevant. Most of them were front-wheel-drive cars.
To hear some people tell it, pretty much the only way to wreck a street car when going too quickly is by understeering off. How I wish that were true, because most of my accidents involved oversteer and 180 degree spins where I backed it off the road. Speeds were usually in the neighborhood of 50-80mph. Yes, I was very lucky. In several instances I'm still amazed to this day how I could have traveled so far off road, into brush and wooded areas, and not struck a tree. Very lucky.
But the point of this story is that most of the time I did not plow off into the woods. I went off backwards, having spun a full 180 degrees shortly after the car left the road. In the one instance where I managed to flip a car (an '82 Trans Am which yes, gives you an idea of just what brand of idiot I was), it spun 90 degrees before going off and digging into the earth. ALL of these spins were caused by lifting off abruptly while turning. One was in a Honda Accord. Another in a CRX. Those are "safe" front-wheel-drive cars. I spun my Miata once the same way, lifting off too abruptly while turning. I spun a Civic Si the same way. Those last two were AFTER I had attended racing school and had a decent idea what I was doing!
So when I hear people talk about how safe and understeery and hard to spin a street car is, I always wonder, how many times have they wrecked or lost control of one? I suspect the answer is often none, because I was enough of an idiot to actually take cars up to the limit of adhesion. But if it's none, then how can they be so certain?
