ABS friend or foe?

[ColeIketani]

I know that some of you aren't going to respect my postion on ABS braking, but like others have said before, I believe that ABS brakes are a godsend for normal driving, for racing it's a bit of a hassle sometimes, but when there is an emergency, like when I hit a patch of ice at one AM then I was glad to have it.

[fatninja19]

Non-abs is only good for road racing purposes.. And thats with kids who can really really controll their cars. ABS is very useful for everday driving..

[ColeIketani]

...Also something I was thinking about just now...if you were so used to driving with ABS, if you raced, wouldn't you just accomodate or adapt even with the "ABS Handicap"?

[Bunta]

Yeah. Supposedly the new viper has ABS and it's stock lap times are a few seconds quicker on most courses than the previous non ABS equipped GTS (I don't know about the ACR). But I still want ABS to be absent on my driving cars. It's just the way it should be.

I'm the type that will sacrifice a few mph/HP/.10 lateral G's to make my car a better learning machine. I want to progress past my car, not have my car be always ahead of my abilities. I added bilstien shocks and H&R springs to my 2002, simply because it needed both items replaced. I don't want to buy Boge shocks and stock springs when I'll be buying upgrades in the future anyway. It DOES handle ten times better now too. Anybody here ever drive a 2002?

[Ghost96Gt]

Abs saved my butt in upstate newyork driving my tahoe it works really well bc u can keep control of the car. Also when i was at my girls house she has this long ass driving down a hill that twists back and fourth and it was ice so it would be alot harder to go down with out it.

[kfoote]

Something that hasn't yet been mentioned: There are different types of ABS. Primarily doe to the increase in processing rate of computers, ABS has gotten a lot better over the last few years and for John. Q. Public's daily driver, is of a lot of benefit. On a track car, a properly designed ABS sytem is an improvement, but a street ABS system has a couple of major downsides on track. The reason that street ABS is bad is that street systems are designed for low speed, low grip conditions, and on a track, the added available grip can create situations where the ABS system gets confused and overloaded, and the brakes can stop working entirely (Very bad). With most street ABS systems, the braking distances are the shortest just before the ABS kicks in. The other downside to ABS, and this is true even with racing ABS systems, is that if something goes wrong and you spin, you want to lock the brakes up. ABS doesn't allow this, and it makes the path of the car a lot more difficult to predict for other drivers approaching the spin. This can have very bad results.

[arkturus]

I personally dislike ABS. Its been my experience that more often than not the ABS will not stop the car as fast as I could do it myself. I used to drive a 95 GT Grand Am that had ABS and it was terrible for racing for that reason, and in daily driving I spent more time making sure the ABS did not activate (it made me really good at braking), and once I finally decided to turn it off things got a lot better.

Its bad for racing, but it can be a good learning tool!

[RACER D12]

Ya the ABS in my dads Landrover comes on all the time also, but I think its just because its screwed up.