rooster99ss

iTrader: (8)

Well, I've never owned a Mustang, so I'll have to take your word for that

01PewterMadre

iTrader: (4)

My tires were not that worn down. I'm the kind of guy who is rather safe than sorry and would buy new tires if I even suspected that the ones I had were too worn. The tires were about 50% thread left. I usually change out my tires earlier than I should just to be sure. The tires are not the only variable that comes into play in these type of accidents. Some of these include weight distribution, tire thread, road conditions, dirt and oil contamination of roads and etc.

Mike96z

iTrader: (78)

Pull the PCM out and have it read, show them the exact speed at the time lol. That sucks though.

Mike96z

iTrader: (78)

Driven mustangs and they are worse, too light in the rear, traction problems in the Camaro dont seem as bad once youve driven one.

02Z28LS1

iTrader: (2)

i'm not just talking out of my *** here, i'm talking from 6 years of first-hand experience in actually daily driving my camaro (and more than 17 years driving in general) in all sorts of weather, snow/ice included. this car doesn't hydroplane any more or less than any of the other cars i've owned/driven.

when i still had the shitty stock tires that came on the car when i bought it, they were low, and i did spin out once by just blipping the throttle for a second or two in 3rd gear and almost wrecked. then i put new tires on it and i could drive it almost as hard in the rain on the new tires as i could on dry pavement on the old ones (yeah, the stock tires were THAT shitty!).

then those tires started wearing down toward the end of their life, and guess what happened? the mph at which it would try to hydroplane started to get lower & lower again. but i actually ended up driving on that set of tires FAR beyond the wear marks (down to the cords on two of them) due to complete lack of extra funds for a while, and never once wrecked it.

i finally got the money to replace the wheels/tires (i wanted 275-width tires, so i had to replace both the wheels & tires at the same time), and got my current set of GS-D3's....and guess what? no more hydroplaning....several times i even intentionally hit some deeper puddles/sheets of water at higher-than-posted speeds, just to see what would happen, and when they were new, these tires never skipped a beat...it just plowed right through it, straight as an arrow.

but now, over the past 2 - 2.5 years of driving on them, they're starting to show signs of wanting to hydroplane at lower speeds again, so i know i'm gonna have to replace them before long, probably within the next 3 - 6 months or so.

it's not exactly rocket science to keep your car from hydroplaning, regardless of what condition the tires are in....my cord-showing tires should be proof enough of that. if you start to feel the car getting a little squirrely in the rain, guess what? you're driving too fast for the condition of the tires and the weather! "so what do you do?", you ask? slow down! see how that works? you could drive on racing slicks in the rain and not hydroplane as long as you're going slow enough.

i'm not saying that this is 100% foolproof, and that unexpected **** doesn't sometimes happen, because it does.....but if you use your head when you're driving in the rain, you can avoid 99.9999% of the potential hydroplaning wrecks that are not caused by external influences. if someone really thinks that the engineering of the car has more influence on hydroplaning than the condition of the tires and how fast you're going, then they're retarded.

weight distribution, road surface/condition, and other factors do play a role, but if you have enough tread on the tires and you're going slow enough, those factors are irrelevant. period.

those people that start complaining about hydroplaning and wrecking their cars may not feel that they were driving too fast, just because they were going less than the posted speed, but they obviously were going too fast for the conditions, or else it wouldn't have happened. all they're doing is trying to shift the blame to somewhere other than themselves.

i don't know about you guys, but if it's a choice between crashing my car or maybe pissing someone else off a little by going slower than the rest of traffic, guess which choice i'm gonna make?

i was driving back home from houston once, and it was raining pretty hard, and there were puddles all over the place in the grooves in the road. i started to feel the car wanting to slide around, so i slowed down from 65mph to 55mph, and it stopped feeling like it was gonna hydroplane. very shortly thereafter, several cars that were behind me caught up to me and passed me in the left lane. one of them was going even faster than my previous 65mph, they flew past me at probably around 70 - 75mph. i thought to myself, "you're a ******* moron". sure enough, about 15 - 20 seconds later, guess what happened? i see his car do a complete 360 from across the other side of the road, through my lane about 50 yards ahead of me, then slide off the road into the grass/mud, and continue to do 2 - 3 more 360's before coming to a stop out in a field about 150 - 175 feet off the side of the road. and guess what? i let that dumb-**** sit out there and i just kept on driving (it was obvious they weren't hurt, there was no ditch and the car never turned over or anything, just spun around a few times....and i could see him bang his hands on the steering wheel).

but again, the point i'm trying to make is that no matter how you try to rationalize it, if you hydroplane, you're going too fast. end of story.

CarsandWomen

iTrader: (19)

fixed it for you!!

tires being worn or not is only a fraction of the equation. Brand new DR's will hydroplane waaaaay before worn KDW's. its all in whats called the Void Ratio, the ratio of total area of the contact patch- how much of it is the lugs on the road and how much is the space between the lugs thats not touching the road.
the voids have to be big enough to displace the water fast enough to keep it out from under the tire itself.

i always keep good tires on mine, but i also light em up everytime it rains just to get a feel for there breaking point at the current time. OP you never know, there could have been an accident there the day before in which 10 gallons of motor oil and ATF was spilled and alowed to soak into the pavement and the water was floating it out.

moral of this story? pay attention, hope for the best, and expect the worst. like Forrest Gump said "**** happens" if it wasent this it could have been somebody run a red light, drunk driver, driving and txt'ing, or a million other things.

rooster99ss

iTrader: (8)

lol, thank you for the long winded response. let me tell you that I myself am 33 years old, I have been driving just as long as you have, I'm actually a professional truck driver so I have WAY more driving experience than you based on the amount of miles that I drive, been driving trucks for 12 years too BTW, and over the years I've had 6 Camaros and one Firebird, and I'll tell you right now, it doesn't matter if you have brand new tires, or if they're real expensive tires, or if you're driving slow or fast, or if you're holding your mouth right, or if your ball sack is hanging to the left instead of the right during the summer solstice............


these cars hydroplane in the rain

just like the OP said, he was doing 55 in a 65 and I've had it happen before, so i know that car whipped around on him before he even knew what was happening, and it's a scary feeling. I'm also sure that as he was doing 360's at 55 mph, that on that same road, some bitch in probably a Toyota Landcruiser or something, was probably comfortably driving by at about 70. This to ME means that f-bodies just aren't that safe in the rain, they are VERY prone to hydroplaning.

Again, I will mention that every time it rains in Houston, or especially Dallas for some reason, there's at least 2 threads that pop up where someone hydroplaned in an f-body and totalled out their car. IT'S NOT COINCIDENCE

01PewterMadre

iTrader: (4)

02z28ls1. Hydroplaning is not as simple as you put it. I had no prior indication that my car was going to hydroplane before it actually did. I am an extremely cautious driver and drive well bellow the speed limit during rainy days. Even if it pisses other drivers that are behind me.

I said she (the other driver) was driving in the fast lane, and she was going fast. When I said she was going 65mph I meant that as a conservative estimate - She could have been going faster. You cannot downplay the role that other variables play when it comes to this type of accident. Cars break down, and accidents occur on the free way every day, which could result in the release oil and other slick fluids onto the roads which could pose a hazard to other drivers especially on rainy days.

After my accident, before the police arrived, other cars were flying past me and the other driver involved the accident. They were going extremely fast in the same type of weather - around 65-80mph. I on the other hand I had been going a grandma-slow 55mph! Let me guess, I should have slowed down? to what 45mph? The way the cars were going on the freeway I would have caused an accident.

My tires were not that worn down. They still had a good 30-50% thread in them. Just last year, I purchased a set of 4 brand spanking new 275/40 17 BF Goodrich KDs and hydroplaned on 610 for about 1 and a half seconds - not much but I did hydroplane in almost new tires. I did my research on hydroplaning and found some interesting things.

I was driving at 55mph on the feeder trying to merge onto the freeway - that is where I hydroplaned.

LS69TA

iTrader: (30)

Alot has to do with the road too. Some places will hold more water than the tires can evacuate..thus you end up on top of it instead of going through it. I'd ran my '98 T/A rear tires down to the point of when it rained I could barely give it any throttle on the highway without the rear breaking loose. That was kinda scary.

Pheonix

iTrader: (16)

I hydroplaned on 225 on the way back from houston right before center street on the fast lane. It had stopped raining long before and there was just a lil puddle in the fast lane. What sucks is i was doing only 55mph and it just went south quick, no time to do **** but wait for the impact. I had good tires front and back.

No matter how you cut it these cars suck ***** in the rain. Thats why id rather drive my motorcycle than my car in the rain, lol

bobbyd

iTrader: (10)

i agree and kinda disagree with the going to fast part.

back in may last year when i dydroplane i was on the right lane going 30mph and i hydroplaned all the way from the right lane to the left lane hit a car on the left lane and then finally i hit the wall.

although i think it was my 315 wheels that were almost done.

one thing i noticed is that the right lane is probably the worse lane to drive in the rain since you might find puddles. middle lane is probably the best one.

ever since that time if its raining i just take the access road all the way to work.

jrm1493

I think one of the major reasons our cars seem to hydroplane is due to the fact that we (typically) run very wide tires relative to the weight of the vehicles. For example, my truck (base F-150) seems really stable in the rain and it weighs about 4200 lb, running 235's on the front and rear. My Camaro probably comes in around 3600 and runs 245s up front and 315s in the back - that means the tires have a whole lot less weight riding on them per square inch of rubber that contacts the road (like about half as much), which would naturally make them want to "float" more and not cut down through the water to the road. Not to mention that my truck's tires have much deeper treads than the pseudo-performance tires I have on my Camaro (Sumitomos).

Most normal 3600 lb cars probably run 215's or 225's which puts much more weight on the tires per inch of road contact. Other contributing factors would be rear wheel drive (less weight over the drive wheels and tendency to fishtail under acceleration) and having limited slip, which I think does more harm than good in the rain. Its a whole lot easier to control a peg leg in the rain than both wheels spinning - my truck has an open diff and spinning in the wet you barely get any lateral motion at all. Also the massive low end torque of the LS V8's means that in the rain you can break loose in 5th or 6th if you aren't careful, something that is simply not possible in a "normal" car with a torque-less motor and more weight over the narrower front drive wheels. I think these are just some of the design compromises that come with having a budget high performance vehicle - they simply won't be as safe in the rain. Higher end high performance vehicles will have computerized control systems to save you from the design limitations but you don't get that in the F-body (but you do get to give them a nice run for 1/10th the price).

Pheonix

iTrader: (16)

+1 I agree with this

Bruser's LS1

iTrader: (20)

Same thing happen to me last year. Driving slower than traffic in the rain, blew right rear tire, spun out and nailed the retaining wall. Trooper gave me a ticket for unsafe speed. Then preceded to tell me my lower car could have been a cause as well, forgetting my car was sitting on 4 flat tires. Idiot.

Pheonix

iTrader: (16)

I dont get it why in the hell do they give tickets when you are already fukd beyond limits and besides that how in the hell do they know what really happened?

I did not get a ticket when it happened to me and the car landed in the middle of the freeway facing traffic during rush hour.

ls1_bean

iTrader: (3)

i hate that feeling man that sucks. my thing shribbles up when that happens

Dirty 30

iTrader: (96)

...and in dry pavement!

ZexGX

iTrader: (28)

That sucks man... Time for a new car!

I agree with you. I've driven my car through a Colorado snow storm with near-bald summer tires and an automatic trans without second gear start in 3" of snow in the middle of a snowstorm and made it out in one piece without any damage to my car. I even had to reverse down a mountain for 15 minutes because the sharp bank of the roadway made my car slide sideways when other cars were passing me up seemingly easily. You just have to know what speed is safe for the conditions. Knowing your cars power and how it handles that power in low-traction situations is key. Having a blowout is unavoidable but losing control because you had your foot on the throttle in a low-traction situation or around a corner is a different situation. Too many puddles in the right lane? Move to the left lane. Hit the puddles in the right lane and spun out? You were going too fast over those puddles for your tires. As the driver of the vehicle you are expected to be in control of the vehicle at all times, this includes BEFORE your catastrophic loss of control from hitting a puddle.

Now, patches of [black] ice and snow everywhere I can understand if you lose control. Puddles of standing water, not so much.

zman1969

iTrader: (91)

why do you think old VW beetles go so well in the snow? small footprint and all the weight on the tires F-bodys arent as bad as Mustangs but tires do matter alot! water is just a lubricant and too much well Y'all know what happens then. The officer was correct you were at fault - we are supposed to be in total control of our vehicles and we do get complacent adding to the accident. who else can you blame? your car went out of control and you were at the wheel. sucks what happened but IMO you came out alive -be glad of that!

rooster99ss

iTrader: (8)

you just got lucky. enjoy the amount of overconfidence that it gave you, because it could get taken away from you next time that it rains