Traction boards

Also called recovery boards, traction mats, sand ladders, Maxtrax, recovery tracks

Traction boards are stiff ramps with aggressive lugs that you wedge under a spinning tire to give it something to bite on, and they are the fastest self-recovery there is when the problem is grip rather than clearance.

What are traction boards?

Moulded nylon or reinforced plastic planks, usually somewhere between forty and forty-five inches long, with rows of hollow teeth on the top face and a ramped end. You clear what you can from in front of a stuck tire, wedge a board under it as far as it will go, and drive out onto it.

They work in sand, snow, mud and on greasy clay, and they work whether you have a winch or not, which is their real advantage: they need no anchor point, no second vehicle and no electrical system. A pair takes two minutes to deploy and is often quicker than rigging a winch would be.

What they cannot do

Fix a clearance problem. If the vehicle is resting on its belly or hung up on a ridge, the tires are not the limitation and a board under a spinning wheel achieves nothing. Traction boards solve traction. Recovering a high-centred vehicle is a jack, a shovel or a winch.

They also do not fix a hole you have not dug out first. Dropping a board against the front of a rut and flooring it just fires the board backwards.

Using them without wrecking them

Gently. Spinning a tire on a plastic board generates enough heat to melt the lugs flat in seconds, which is the single most common way boards get ruined. Use the lowest gear available, keep the revs down, let the tire find the teeth and drive off the end. If it spins, stop and reset the board.