Snow news - Top Gear's Top Snow Tips - 2009

With all the snow and crashing going on outside, we thought we’d put together a list of helpful winter driving tips. To enable you to get home safely and not slide helplessly into a ravine. Or Tesco. So we put our heads together and came up with this:

· Don’t own a Corvette.

· Don’t bother with the trains. It’s the wrong type of snow. Ditto for buses, tubes, rickshaws or any other public transport operator looking for a day off. Seriously, guys: tubes run underground. There’s no snow there. Sort it out.

· If you do own a Corvette, don’t drive it.

· If you are forced to drive anything, drive it slowly.

· Very slowly.

· Try the brakes. But before that, make sure no one is following close behind you. Do that by using your mirror. Use your mirror a lot. It will show sliding people about to crash into you. They will be out there, but don’t do their driving for them. Get out of their way and let them go and crash into someone else.

· Go slowly.

· Try the brakes. That will give you an idea of your stopping distance at that spot on that surface and at that speed. It will also give your brain an idea of the grip level on that surface at that particular spot at that speed. If you hit something, this means you have no grip.

· Go slowly.

· Note the appearance of the surface at that particular spot. Then, try the power and see how much wheelspin you get. That will also give your brain an idea of the grip level at that particular spot. Do not attempt to assess grip level via high-speed cornering. You will crash.

· Go slowly.

· Watch your surface. If it is white, bad. If it is black, better. But it may still have ice beneath the mostly-black slush. Bad. Assume no grip but try it anyway, you might have more than you think. Then again, you might not.

· So go slowly.

· Never, ever find an empty car park and do massive donuts for half an hour. If you want to learn to drive on ice, talk to this man.

· Buy a massive, ostentatious SUV and enjoy the only day of the year that you can drive it through town without looking like a big eco-tard.

· Better still, skive the day and stay in bed. Enjoy daytime telly and a sneaky mid-morning, er, cup of tea. Job done.