"Brian Reay" wrote in message
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You could use the handbrake partially, ie not full on.

Why use the handbrake at all, if the footbrake is still working fine?

Over reving the engine is the lesser of the evils compared to a high speed
collision.

I was thinking in terms of a con rod breaking which would probably seize the
crankshaft which would be bad news with the energy of the large mass of the
flywheel having to be dissipated very rapidly as it came to rest, possibly
locking the transmission (even with the slight clearance of a clutch pedal
being pressed) and hence the wheels.

I don't know how fast an engine might turn if all the mechanical load is
removed at full throttle, and how much extra load this would place on the
con rods. Modern cars with fuel injection and and ECU would almost certainly
have a rev limiter. But the car I was driving was much older than that, with
a carburettor, so there would be no limit to the engine speed, other than
normal engine friction and the maximum fuel flow that the carb could manage.


If you just turned off the engine on a manual, in neutral, then turn ign
on, you could steer without power steering and have basic brakes.

As it happens, the car no PAS and no servo brakes, so neither would have
suffered.

I have since (in a much more recent car) driven with no PAS when my "fan
belt" broke at 70 on the motorway. Getting the car off the motorway to a
garage where I could wait safely for the RAC took a bit more effort to steer
than normal, but was not impossible. Strangely the brakes did not seem to be
affected, so maybe the brake servo is driven by something other than the
"fan belt". Obviously on a car with an electric fan, the one thing that the
belt does not drive is the radiator fan. Having seen the tortuous path that
the belt ought to take (it had vanished and was probably in Lane 3 of the
motorway) I wasn't going to attempt to jury-rig a replacement, even if I'd
had anything to make a long enough loop. It's as easy as in the days of a
longitudinal engine where the belt just goes round three pulleys
(alternator, water pump and fan) and is at the front of the car, without
loads of tensioning pulleys and very little space to work between the engine
and the front wheel. Even the RAC man said it was virtually impossible on a
modern car to replace the belt at the roadside, even if he carried the right
spare for the car.

Would you believe after I had the belt replaced at my local garage, the
replacement failed in the same way about 2000 miles later. The garage had
failed to spot that the flanges of one of the pulleys were bent out of
shape, which had shredded the replacement belt and may well have been the
cause (rather than the side-effect) of the first belt failing. The garage
denied all liability and wouldn't pay anything, so I stopped using them.