If you are learning to drive you might have found it surprisingly difficult to steer neatly around a tight corner.
It doesn’t look that difficult when we watch other people drive,
but there are quite a few skills that must be used in this situation.
This video will take you through every skill you will need to stay safe when steering around tight corners.
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As we’ve just said, there are several skills needed to steer neatly around a tight corner.
First, we must spot the corner, then change our speed and gear,
move our hands so we are ready to steer,
start steering the car at the correct moment, and then follow our lane neatly.
Let’s go somewhere quiet and take a look at each part of the process separately,
before returning to the town centre to practice driving around tight junctions.
To help us spot the corner as soon as possible we always look well ahead on our road,
to give us the most amount of time to deal with the corner.
To assess how sharp the corner or junction is, we look at the radius of the bend.
If we can see a lot of the road around the corner, then the bend is gentle and we can relax a little.
If the road disappears quickly around the bend, the corner is sharp and we must react promptly.
Now that we know a sharp corner is ahead, we must change our speed to match the corner.
Getting our speed correct is crucial, as it will give us enough time to steer our car.
The earlier and more gently we can start braking, the better
- as our brake lights will give any following drivers warning that a sharp corner is ahead.
If we are driving a manual car, we will also need to change into the best gear for the corner ahead.
We normally choose 2nd gear for tight corners, and 3rd for more open bends - but this will vary between cars.
If we see a tight corner, we can anticipate that we will need to turn the steering wheel quite a lot,
so we like to adjust our hand position so we are ready to steer.
Positioning our hand at the top of the steering wheel before the turn means that we can turn into the bend easily,
as our leading hand can turn the wheel for half a turn before we switch to the other hand.
Our preferred steering technique is to feed the wheel between our hands like this for tight corners,
as it is quick and accurate, and our arms don’t cover the car's airbag.
We must start steering into the bend at the right moment, otherwise, we will turn the car too tightly or wide.
We look for where the corner actually starts, and then turn into the corner accurately.
The actual amount of steering we need to use will vary depending on how sharp the corner is,
and how the steering of the car is set up.
This car’s steering has only one turn in each direction before reaching full lock,
so we don’t need to steer quite as much as our other car would on the same corner.
We must steer precisely to keep our car in our lane at all times,
to avoid running off the road or endangering oncoming traffic.
Also, we look ahead for changes in the corner’s radius,
so we are ready to adjust our steering if the bend gets tighter or opens out.
Now that we know how to handle a tight corner,
we have driven into our local town to practice steering around a few junctions.
As before, we will need to look ahead and decide how tight each junction is
so that we can approach at the best speed.
We are about to turn right, and since it’s a very tight corner we drop to 1st gear.
As mentioned earlier, we recommend feeding the wheel for tighter corners.
However, if you prefer to use a different technique - then that’s fine,
as long as the car is in full control at all times.
In the UK the examiner on a Driving Test will be marking your control over your car,
not how you hold the steering wheel.
Crossing your hands will not be a problem unless it leads to a loss of control.
The end of this road is a closed junction, so we approach very slowly
as it gives us more time to look both ways, and then steer our car.
The next road on the left is a very tight turn, so we stay in 1st to give us time to steer carefully.
At most other junctions we use 2nd gear, but that would have been far too fast for this tight corner.
This narrow road is one-way and has another closed junction for us to exit from
- but as long as our approach speed is correct, we will have enough time to smoothly steer our car.
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