i know it somehow locks the back wheels, does it work like normal disc brakes? and ive heard some people use it for cornering, how so?
If it drove, and you weren't flooring it to make it go, it wasn't on all the way. Hopefully. At best - nothing bad happened. People do it all the time and usually such a short distance won't hurt anything. Especially if it was at low speeds. At the worst, you've fried your brake pads and rotors. At the very worst, you may have boiled the fluid out of the brake cylinders and the grease out of the rear wheel bearings. Was there a lot of smoke coming out of the rear wheels? Regardless, have it checked out.
The normal brakes on a car are activated by a hydraulic system so that it just takes a little force on the pedal to apply a lot of braking force to all four wheels. The emergency brake doesn't use hydraulics - it just uses a cable going directly the the rear brakes. It won't stop you as fast but if you get air in your brake lines or something, it is better than nothing. Some people do use the emergency brake when drifting (cornering while sliding sideways) because it can help them initiate the slide. In a rear wheel drive car with a stick shift car, generally the driver will do a clutch kick and accelerate to get the rear wheels spinning. If that alone doesn't do it, he can pull the handbrake to lock the rear wheels before dropping the clutch and accelerating to spin them. In a front wheel drive car, you can't make the rear wheels spin so locking them up is the only way to reduce traction on command. Pulling the handbrake accomplishes this. Drifting is dangerous, hard on the car and very hard on the tires. I wouldn't suggest trying it.
In cars, the hand brake (also known as the emergency brake, e-brake, park brake, or parking brake) is a supplementary system that can be used if the vehicle's primary brake system (usually hydraulic brakes) has a failure. Automobile e-brakes usually consist of a cable (usually adjustable for length) directly connected to the brake mechanism on one end and to some type of lever that can be actuated by the driver on the other end. The lever is traditionally and more commonly a hand-operated system (hence the hand brake name), the most common configuration being a handle on the floor between the driver and front passenger, and less commonly being a handle bar located on the lower portion of the dashboard somewhere close to the steering wheel column. Alternatively, the lever can also be foot-operated, in form of a pedal in the foot well in front of the driver, located to the far left apart from the other pedals. However, the most common use for an automobile emergency brake is to keep the vehicle motionless when it is parked, thus the alternative name, parking brake. Car emergency brakes have a ratchet locking mechanism that will keep them engaged until a release button is pressed. On vehicles with automatic transmissions, this is usually used in concert with a parking pawl in the transmission. Automotive safety experts recommend the use of both systems to immobilize a parked car, though many individuals use only the Park position on the automatic transmission and not the parking brake. Also, manual transmission cars are recommended to be left in in their lowest gear (usually either first or reverse) when parked, especially when parked on an incline. It should be noted, however, that increasing vehicle moving resistance may increase damage in the event of a crash - less momentum can be gained through the car rolling and hence more energy is transferred to the disfigurement of the crashed vehicles
