Here’s the diagram of the reversing exercise.
gov.uk/government/uploads/s … iagram.pdf
You start off in the bottom right, by the letter Z.
You drive straight forwards, stopping with the front of the truck on the line between cones A and A1. Tip: Position yourself as close to cone A as you can. There will be a mirror above the passenger window, looking straight down. You can use this to tell you where to stop.
Engage reverse.
As soon as you start moving, go straight to left lock.
Lean out your window, looking straight down at your front wheel. Keep going back until the wheel approaches the line. When it does, take off enough left lock so that the wheel runs parallel to the line.
Keep going back with your right front wheel running parallel to the line (but a few inches away), adding more lock as you go to keep them parallel, until you can see cone B in the driver’s side mirror.
When you can see cone B, look beyond to the box - can you see cone C (it has a pole in it like cone B)? Keep the lock on until you can just see the cone on the left of cone C.
Once you can see the cone to the left of C, straighten up.
Now it’s just a case of going back and putting on right lock to turn it into the bay, keeping cone C in your driver’s mirror, and moving the one to the left of it into your passenger mirror (and keeping it there). This is essentially no different to parking into a normal car parking space, just with a longer, wider vehicle. On the plus side, the bay is one-and-a-half times the width of your vehicle, so you should have more than half a metre either side to play with, whereas car park bays are much tighter.
The last thing to do is to stop with the back of the vehicle inside the black hatched area. Your instructor will give you a “cheat” to tell you how to know when you stop. It might be to line up a marking on the side of the truck with the edge of the box, or something like that, or they might even have a reversing camera fitted.
IMPORTANT POINT: during all of the above, you need to keep doing all-round observation, especially during the “front-wheel-follows-the-line” bit, where it’s very tempting to just keep leaning out the window looking at the front wheel. During this part, it’s a good idea to stop completely whilst you’re looking around - partly because it means that you won’t go over the line without noticing, and partly because it demonstrates to the examiner that you’re consciously making all-round observations.
Hopefully you can see how you could try this out in an empty car park. You won’t have the cones (in particular cone B, since cones A and A1 are basically the bay you’re starting from, and the ones around C are the bay you’re aiming for), and you won’t be able to do the “front wheel follows the line” stuff (since you’ll have to cross the line anyway, and the geometry of a car is all wrong), but you can at least practice aiming for the box and getting in without touching the lines. You might need to adjust your wing mirrors to point down a bit more, though, so that you can see the parking bay lines.
