The other day I was wearing my sandals for the first time, while driving the S. I was amazed at how much easier it was to heel toe. I use the same method as described above.

 

Yeah, the "trick" of heal-toe is to pivot your foot on your heel not your toe. Your heel should be planted directly under the throttle and never move from there. It helps to use the transmission tunnel as your guide.

When you need to brake and downshift swing the top of your foot to the left so it looks like \\ and press. Your heel will naturally come up off the floor. Then when you need your blip press down your heel. Presto!

I really don't understand the idea of downshifting under light braking, it makes no practical sense to me. Unless you are shedding a lot of speed why are downshifting? Are you in the right gear to begin with?

I suggest working on this under hard braking when the brake pedal is down enough to match the height of the throttle and you are maintaining enough pressure on the brake to not jerk the car by applying more pressure when you blip the throttle and forget about the rest of it. Dropping 2000 RPM on light braking shouldn't cause you to need a lower gear. Blipping the throttle at 7000 RPM makes little sense IMHO because it puts you at or above redline in the next lower gear which means you either spin, bend a valve or need to immediately upshift.

Ideally on light braking you want to learn to left-foot brake so you don't need to lift off the throttle. I can't do it with any finesse so don't try but ideally you'd want to do both, heel-toe when you down shift and left-foot when you don't.

The method of putting only part of your foot on the brake and rotating your ankle so you can blip the throttle with the right edge of your foot sounds dangerous, unreliable and not very transferable to other cars to me. When I'm coming to the end of a 115 MPH straight and am going down 2 gears under ABS the last thing I want is to rotate my ankle with only 1/4 of my foot on the brake and have it slide off. That could be ugly.

 

Eric, You might be right. I havn't had the chance to run on a track yet. The only experience I have at really pushing the car is on roads like Deal's Gap and Crow mountain. My method works great on those type of roads. Well, mostly crow mountain, you don't shift as much running the Dragon. When I get to run on the track it might be different. I am just trying to learn and appreciate the input. I started out trying to do it the way you describe, but I could never quite get it comfortable with it. Next time out I'll try using the tranny tunnel as a guide.

 

As a counterpoint, I place the ball of my foot in the center of the brake pedal and pivot on the ball of the foot. I'm sure my foot ends up in the same orientation as Erik's, but I find that centering on the brake pedal is more secure for me. If I miss the gas pedal, the worst that'll happen is I lock up the rears and do a double-180 at 100+ at the end of the front straight at ThunderHill, right under the timing tower. Makes for good spectating I hear

 

Ball of foot should be on center of brake pedal. If you mess up and your heel misses the gas for blip, that's much better than foot slipping off brake pedal.

 

right by the timing tower? You're braking WAY to early

I too, don't plan my heel like erik does. I use the ball of my foots.

 

That was also due to the fact that you had no brake pad on your left front that time (piston welded to the backing plate ).

 

How much room do you need to do 2 spins? If I had waited any later, I would have missed T1

 

Yes. This is what I do as well. My original post might make it sound like my foot is barely on the brake pedal, but it's firmly planted in the center. So, poor wording on my part, perhaps.

 

I need to go to driving school. I wish they had some out here in Hawaii.