If you went to a high performance driving course and they directed you out on to the skidpan, you wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. You might nod knowingly if they turned the sprinklers on to kick off some wet driving lessons. When they start putting flour on the road though, you might ask some questions. And yet, I’m told this is actually a valid training technique that totally isn’t made up.
This story came to us from Twitter. One @AskYatharth was posting about their glorious trip to the Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles. “The most fun thing was the flour track,” they said. I’d never heard of that, so I read on. “They dump a bunch of white flour onto a track and [you] try to finish it as fast as possible,” they explained. “Here you are, going 20 mph, having the time of your life.”
Most of my experience with white flour is with pancakes, or when I’m cooking up my excellent fried chicken. I’d never heard of it in an automotive context before, so I decided to dig a little deeper.
the flour track is slippery & slidey and models what its like going 80mph & turning hard. without the danger!
so i could actually experiment, and feel, for the 1st time, how braking before a corner "put weight into the front" & made the wheels turn more
it feels like witchcraft
— yatharth (???? asheville sep15–20) (@AskYatharth) September 8, 2024
Yatharth’s experience basically explains the whole point of the exercise. “The flour track taught me more than anything else,” they explain. “I could experiment, brake hard, accelerate, spin out, [and] see what happens. All this theory I read could be felt here, safely, instead of actually getting up to dangerously high speeds and sliding into concrete.”
That makes sense. When teaching car control, it’s great if you can find a way to lower the speed at which the vehicle loses grip. This allows the driver to find the limits of adhesion without having to react as quickly as they would at higher speeds on a dry, grippy surface. What didn’t make sense to me is where the flour came into it. The typical way this is achieved is with water and sprinklers, after all!
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To find out what the deal with the flour was, I simply asked! Brandon Schulhof is a marketing expert with the Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles and was more than happy to answer my questions.
“The purpose of applying flour to our Low Friction Handling Circuit is to maintain a consistent low-grip surface,” he explained. “It’s a polished concrete/dry module, [with] no water system.” While the facility does have a sprinkler-equipped skidpad, this is a separate thing entirely.
“The powder (flour) gives us a consistent, low-mu surface, which is perfect for car control training,” Brandon says. By low-mu, he’s referring to the coefficient of friction—which is referred to in equations by the Greek letter Mu (μ). Basically, flour makes the surface slippery.
There’s a little more to it than that, though. “As rubber transfers to the concrete, the surface’s grip level increases,” he says. “This reduces the ability to break traction easily, making the exercise increasingly difficult.” It creates a natural progression for any exercises undertaken on the Low Friction Handling Circuit.
The flour is literally just scooped out of a bucket and dumped on the track. Then, a broom is used to spread it out into a thin, even coating. That’s enough to create a nice low-friction surface for wheeling about with abandon.
Obviously, it takes a little more effort than just switching on a bunch of sprinklers. At the same time, nobody has to get wet, and the infrastructure required is minimal. Just a bucket, a broom, and some elbow grease.
I realized I should have asked if they used plain or white flour. And, of course, whether there was a gluten-free option. But ultimately I suspect it doesn’t matter a whole lot for this application. It’s about friction in this case, not bubbles of air or wheat proteins.
Ultimately, it sounds like a blast, and it’s just one aspect of the Porsche Experience Center in LA. Beyond that, Brandon tells me there’s much more fun to be had. He notes the LA facility also has a “Kick Plate module” of which there are only two in the country. It’s a hydraulic plate that causes the vehicle passing over it to suddenly oversteer to test the driver’s reactions.
The kick plate installed at Porsche’s experience center in Silverstone.
Porsche’s Ice Hill setup seems like something out of a glorious automotive theme park. I guess that’s what it is.
There’s also a traditional concrete skidpad called the “Low Friction Circle,” and the polished concrete Ice Hill with a 7% slope and water jets to really test a driver in low-grip conditions. Then there’s the 1.3-mile Handling Circuit, a Dynamics Pad, and an off-road park, too. I felt like it was kind of mean of him to boast about this given I’m stuck sitting 7,000 miles away but I suppose he was just doing his job.
In any case, I learned something today. If you want to learn car control, apparently a little sprinkle of flour is of great assistance in that regard. Who knew?
Images provided by Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles
And this boys and girls is how donuts are made.
I drive on a low mu surface every winter here in the great white north. Some days it’s ice other days snow or rain or a fun mix of all three. Always challenging, exciting and random. Avoiding other vehicles and pedestrians just adds to the frission.
Long ago, in like the 90s, I went to a go-kart place in I think Atlanta that had a slick track. It was sealed concrete and the cars had very hard tires so it was a drift fest. Plus if you tipped the kids running it they would toss baby powder out in the turns.
That’s a big pizza pie, in the sky…that’s Amore!
After my brother and I mastered and got tired of taking our 1/32 scale slot cars around the tracks we set up, we got the goofy idea of spraying WD-40 onto the curved sections. The lurid power slides that ensued amused us. If drifting had been a thing back then (late 60s) we might have sprayed the whole track.
Now I’m suddenly curious what driving through a Non-Newtonian skid pad would look like.
I assume flour was chosen because of its uniformity, price, and benign impact to the track/vehicles.
This brings a totally new meaning to “All purpose flour”.
Seems like an interesting way to test the handling of my Porsche Paneramera.
Hmm, bags of flour. Too bad this wasn’t known when the Mythbusters tested out vehicle escape techniques. That would have been fun to see bags of flour spread out by the perps to thwart those in pursuit.
Sounds like a great idea and more predictable than, say, wet leaves in New England. Prefer it be someone else’s car to clean after, though!
I hadn’t heard they were using flour there, but they were having issues with rubber build up on the surfaces. This most likely helps reduce that. As for the wetted surfaces, it is all reclaimed water, no fresh potable water is used. The kickplate and low friction circle fun to drive, highly recommend trying them out. I was involved in the planning and design of both facilities.
So if you spritz it with water and let it dry on a hot day do you get a cracker?
Yes, but the texture is a little rubbery
…and when it eventually rains, your car will stick like glue.
Please tell us they feed us donuts.Please tell us they feed us donuts.Please tell us they feed us donuts…
So the next time I’m slinging my car through the twisties and hanging the ass out in a power slide, I can refer to it as going “whole wheat?” Talk about driving syruptitiously.
It has to be maple!, okay?
I’m not at all surprised, seeing that Porsche used to have a Pancake engine. 😉
If you rinse if off, but don’t get it all, you actually increase stickiness in an Elmer type of way.
“Here you are, going 20 mph, having the time of your life.”
Some of the most fun I’ve ever had behind the wheel of a car was in my first car, a non-turbo, automatic Volvo 244 with a set of Firestone Winterforces and ~50ish pounds of kitty litter in the trunk, through an inch or two of fresh powder on twisty back roads. I believe them.
I had a similar experience, but with a 244DL with the 4-speed stick out in my family’s pasture land. The synchros were shot for third and fourth gear, so second gear was all it could do, but it was an absolute blast for pretend rally racing at 15-20mph.
185/70 WinterForces on an old Subaru GL made me feel like an absolute driving god on snow & gravel. And, the consequences were quite low
I had no idea I was so ahead of the curve back in the 70s when I made an ad hoc Hotwheels track in my father’s flour barrel!
Absurd food waste so Porsche drivers can do meme car-control exercises is a level of opulent indulgence I never thought I’d read about
I’d argue a couple scoops of flour is a lot less wasteful than dozens or hundreds of gallons of water. Not to mention the Porsche Driving Center isn’t exactly for memes, it’s proper education, and something like this that provide genuine lessons in car control in a controlled and safe environment is genuinely useful. A few scoops of flour while learning real skills is hardly the biggest waste of resources to be arguing about compared to some opulent past times.
I’ll keep that in mind next time a semi carrying flour flips in front of me on the freeway
Pretty sure its going to take a lot more than a couple scouts of flour. Probably several pounds to cover a single section. Thats a lot more expensive than a few hundred gallons of water that could be reused for landscaping.
Back when I was in to drifting I could wear out 4 pairs of rear tyres in a morning. Using just a Miata.
Flour is cheaper and less wasteful.
Your pissing in the Cheerios isn’t exactly helping the food waste problem, either.
As a longtime resident of SoCal I’ll happily argue that using flour is a lot more palatable and less wasteful than burning through our scarce water resources.
How much water do you think it took to grow that wheat? And that water isn’t wasted if its later used to irrigate the lawn.
Shirley. You can’t be serious.
“I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley.”
Agreed.
Sand is far less wasteful and more abundant.
Sand is far more abrasive.
So is Adrian – but nobody seems to mind.
I believe you are being sarcastically funny, sir?