Hello all, first post, been a lurker with another name for a while, and probably not a post that will probably bring much excitement, but I know we have a few people here that are rather into rallying and general driving enthusiasts here so I was wondering if anyone would be willing to talk driving technique?

A conversation from another forum:

I said:
I do however wonder why you say you need to "go faster" in a FWD car when snow is present: that just makes it worse. You need to maintain momentum and be able to control weight transfer, not necessarily maintain speed. That is to say that defining a minimum speed for a car in snow doesn't make much sense: in all cars, especially on snow, you need to adjust speed accordingly to road conditions. On snow, if you need to accelerate, that may or may not give you the best evasive results.

He said:
You need to both maintain a minimum momentum for weight transfer (M=m*v^2, and since m isn't changing but very sligtly as I consume gas, I must add v to get more M), and the second part is that you must maintain enough road clearing abilit of your tires to allow one of FWD's great advantages to kick in: that when you stomp on the gas, you can adjust the velocity independent of speed. That is to say, you can use the actual spinning of the tires to make faster evasives. This is needless to say very, very tricky, and best learned on something like a DTS or Avalon or some Tauruses, which by virtue of their length and weight and power amplify this effect, but that's the why behind the what. Properly executed, in 2" of snow at 35 MPH I could take my Avalon and shift it left or right 8' either way within one and a half car lengths and end going straight - a feat that's tricky to do on dry pavement. At 15 MPH, I couldn't execute the same maneouver.

Is he right to say that, in snow, the best idea with a front wheel drive car is to maintain a higher speed for evasive driving? I get where he is going with FWD and direction changes: by having the wheels angled and the power going to them, technically you can set a car in a different direction very fast. But on snow, and assuming low traction conditions? The tires should just break free of any traction they had and continue to spin, but not change the direction of the car, right? Because we have forward momentum to overcome first?