It’s never good when your trailer overtakes your vehicle. As I understand it, death was narrowly averted. So, on the cusp of this holiday season, I want to make sure this does not happen to you.   

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Here’s six preventative towing tips.  Number one: Minimise the mass of the trailer relative to the vehicle towing it. When it comes to trailers and safety, smaller is definitely better, and it terrifies me the people who e-mail me direct and say, basically, that they want to tow three tonnes with the smallest vehicle possible, because it’s also their daily driver.  That’s nuts. If you want to tow a heavy trailer, get a heavy vehicle. This is the fundamental stability solution. Personally I think it’s fairly insane to tow a trailer heavier than the kerb mass of the vehicle towing it.   Number two: get the trailer and the vehicle set up right, with five to 10 per cent of the loaded mass of the trailer as the static towball download. That’s ideal for stability. Measure the weights - do not guess, or read them off a spec sheet. Visit a weighbridge and do this right.  Number three, drive conservatively. That means, knock 10 or 15 kays off how you’d normally drive (conservatively). It can feel quite OK towing heavy at 100 - but it can also come unglued very rapidly, as you’ve seen. Just change your mindset here, and for Christ’s sake, let faster vehicles past at every opportunity. There’s no need to ramp up the tension on an already struggling road system.  Number four: Leave some ‘acceleration juice’ in the tank. Meaning: one of the reasons the driver of this ill-fated towing assignment crashed out is that if you drive a trailer and it starts to get the death wobbles, the best move is: accelerate gently and don’t try counter-steering. (Because acceleration reduces amplitude, and counter-steering often causes the amplitude of the subsequent swing to increase - and you only get about four swings until it’s all over, at speed, right?)  Number five: Get some driver training. This trains you to look as far down the road as possible, which is generally where you want the vehicle and the trailer to go, in that order. Under pressure, you generally steer where you’re looking and it’s less likely you’ll over-compensate with the steering.  Finally - number six: If you’re upgrading the vehicle, get one with a ‘trailer anti-sway’ algorithm built into the electronic stability control system. Computers are generally better at this than most/all drivers. Not only do they detect the problem and intervene sooner, but they also intervene better, by cutting power when it’s needed and applying the brakes to individual wheels to generate the yaw response needed to cure the problem.  The best cure here is prevention. Just don’t get in this situation. Tow a conservative trailer and drive conservatively.