>* Wildest may have been when our car left the road on a
>gravel road during a car trial after adopting increasingly
>violent weavings that showed no sign of being overcome.
>Rolling was going to happen sooner or later so leaving the
>road and flattening a fence was a good choice.

Was it a front wheel drive car? I have had this happen a couple of times in 
an Austin 1300 GT I once owned, and the problem occurs when you get one 
wheel off the road surface onto a (relatively) slippery surface, such as 
grass. The other wheel then causes the one on the slippery surface to rotate 
backwards, and the person steering then has a wild ride. The solution is to 
apply sufficient power that both wheels are being driven by the motor, and 
there is no motion transmission back through the differential.

Your story with the trailer reminds me of an incident I had with carrying 
the aforementioned Austin on a car trailer, the towing vehicle being a 
Triumph 2000. The trailer that I had hired had the wheels too far forward 
for the length of trailer, and it was too easy to get the load improperly 
balanced - but I didn't know that at the time ...

Anyway I had the car on the trailer, and was proceeding from Petone 
foreshore towards Wellington - thankfully late enough in the evening for 
there to be very few cars around. Now to come from the foreshore you come 
over a bridge that carries you over the railway, and i suspect this was the 
first part of my undoing. The whole car and trailer started fishtailing down 
the ramp onto the level piece of road - three lanes wide narrowing to two, 
and then opening to three again at the far end of the straight which was the 
best part of a 1/2 mile long, possibly more. The whole incident ended with 
the trailer going sideways into the solid concrete median barrier, and the 
car being at sufficient angle in its fishtailing that only the rear corner 
hit the barrier. This collision was enough to bring it all to a halt, and 
allowed me to collect my thoughts before moving off again.

The damage was minor really, a small amount of panel damage to the rear 
quarter of the car, the bumper required replacing, and the towbar was badly 
twisted, but not that bad that I couldn't carry on my way from the scene. I 
proceeded the rest of the way home at a much more sedate pace, thankful that 
there had been no other traffic around to get mixed up with. If there had 
been other vehicles around it could have been quite a trail of destruction. 

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