A "Rockford Turn" is a reverse J-turn, since you start off in reverse. In the late 70's & early 80's, I and my friends watched RF, Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs, anything like that. It was a somewhat rural area, and there was a factory with a very large parking lot on the edge of town that was closed weekends. So we would go practice everything we saw on TV (except the jumps, clearly that was faked). I wish we'd had been video cameras then. And that was long before any car had anti-lock brakes, stability control, computers or AWD. It was probably easier in RWD cars, too.
In drive, you can use the emergency brake to lock the rear wheels, steer sharply to spin the rear of the car around, release & hit the gas and be going back the way you came from . We would use the parking lines to get to where we could do it and stay within the width of two lanes. None of our cars had hand brakes, so we'd just have the left hand ready to pull the release. Until one of my friends got the great idea of using a piece of wood carved to fit around the cable behind the lever to keep the brake "released" at all times. Then we could just step on the e-brake and let up. Never used it as a parking brake anyway.
The Rockford is a lot more fun and actually did get me away from a gang of a-holes once. While looking these videos up, I saw a few different people's opinion of how to do it. One used a Suburban, and had he been on a street, the turn was so wide he would have ended up on the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
We found the best way was to get plenty of speed in reverse so that inertia would keep the car moving in a fairly straight line. Sharp wheel turn, then when letting off the gas, a little brake to lock the front wheels & shift weight rearward helped to tightly spin the car, shift to drive, hit the gas and go. Enough speed was key to staying in the same lane
Now, with all the safety features, I haven't tried any of that for a long time. I've heard it can damage all kinds of expensive things. It's hard to even get my car to do donuts in the snow. The switch that is supposed to turn the nannies off doesn't seem to turn them all the way off. So I'm not trying any of that on pavement. Of course, the benefit is all that safety. In a blizzard that car is rock steady.
Since this is a Rockford Files thread, here's a compilation of Rockford reverse J-turns
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