Gaining Traction in the Rain?

[Rope-Pusher]

He not busy being born is busy dying.

[avenger28]

I've been very bussyyyy!
@theholycow.
I had some time a couple of days ago and found a very big and empty parking lot.
I tried to recreate the situation and i was not able to.
Either it was not how i remembered it, or the environment was very different.
In any case.
What i recall now is more similar to this
1. You tried to steer but the car kept going straight. Your front wheels lost traction. Understeer.

After avoiding the first car. I braked hard, steered left. ABS came on, tried to steer so my car would straighten up, however it didn't respond to that input (note that my car is not going in the direction of the initial left steer) and my car stopped slightly over a meter (a guess, wasn't too far however) after that.

The diagram isn't the best or the clearest, i know.

Would clutch in, and braking still be the best solution?

[theholycow]

Would clutch in, and braking still be the best solution?

Yes. There's nothing you can practically do about understeer in that situation.

If you are NOT on a public road with other vehicles there are a couple strategies you can try to compensate for understeer but they are not dependable enough for the real world and if you get in a crash you'll be blamed for trying them. They are:
- what I call the FWD powerslide, where you ignore the lateral traction of the tires entirely, accelerating as hard as you can and steering in the direction you want to go so that the forward traction of the tires pulls your car in that direction (very, very risky)
- trying to induce oversteer by using your parking brake to break rear traction; this is most likely to result in a 4 wheel sideways skid but could potentially transfer weight to your front tires while freeing up their traction

Those aren't specific to manual transmissions, and they are very dangerous...they're just moves to try on a closed course (or at least an abandoned parking lot) to see if they can work for you.