Good advice Richard.
Here's a story about a winching event that happened to me.
I have a rather large trailer, big enough to put my F250 4 x 4 pickup into. This trailer gets backed down my driveway, and parks on a decent incline. I usually work on everything myself, but because of too many things on my list for the month, decided to tow the truck elsewhere for a transmission rebuild. Even though the truck will fit into the trailer, it's a tight fit, so winching it in makes more sense. So I did. The winch was a 3500 lb rated winch. It did it fine, maybe struggling a little, but it did it.
So off I go, drop off the truck and arrive to pick it up again. I'm parked behind the shop on level ground, with the F250 at the end of the ramp, and start winching it in. About halfway up the ramp, the winch breaks. Not the cable, but the pawls or internal gears. There goes the pickup, rolling backwards down the ramp, and probably 50 feet down the parking lot.
Thankfully there was nothing there for the pickup to hit, and I wasn't standing along side or worse, behind it as I was winching it in. It was a real eye opener how far it rolled, and how quickly it happened. A person's first reaction is to grab onto it and try to slow it down, but that's a guaranteed way to get run over by your own car. This was on dead flat ground. If it had happened in my driveway, the truck would have ended up in my neighbor's kitchen, and then probably all the way down the hill into Bothell. Not good.
So now I'm imagining all the times I winched my race car into the trailer, both at home, and at the track. I'm usually parked opposed to someone else in the paddock, and a car rolling out the back would crash into someone else's pit at best, or run over them at worst.
The take aways for me were many. I purchased a legitimate recovery winch rated at 8000 lbs. Not cheap at $600 or so, but in the grand scheme of things, a lot cheaper than some of the alternatives. I also added remote activation capability, so I don't have to stand near the car, or ideally, will ride in the car so I can use the car's brakes if need be.
As usual, your results may vary...