I agree with you there, however I find that the most common downshift for me is when I downshift to take a corner.
Also by knowing the approximate speeds at which I upshift each gear during my normal daily driving (usually 4000rpm), it gives me an indication of how high I need to rev on the rev-match when going back down.

 

I've never double clutched in my life. On old, non-synchro transmission you had to double clutch in order to keep from grinding the gears (or so I am told). On synchro transmissions, you don't. But if you really abuse the sychros a lot (by wildly mismatching revs), they will wear out much more quickly.

The biggest reason to heel and toe on the track is to avoid upsetting the car! If you can match revs smoothly, the car never "knows" you shifted. Otherwise, you can jerk the car. The fact that it also helps with wear and tear is a plus.

As for street use -- the street is the place to practice the heel and toe. Too many other things to worry about on the track. So practice it all the time on the street, and it will start to come naturally on the track. And it might help the wear and tear on the street as well.

 

For those interested in an excellent illustrated Heel & Toe tutorial, have a look at this:

http://www.dietersmotorsports.com/te...el_and_toe.htm

Practice practice practice

Brian

 

[QUOTE=mxt_77,Sep 26 2004, 07:24 PM]True... it's not hard to work out, but are you going to memorize the RPM for every gear at every possible speed so you can rev-match when you downshift to that speed?

 

I really like that idea that way you could have a visual represnetaton of how much throttle to achieve smooth shifts.

 

That's a nifty idea, but not useful for a racecar because when racing, are you really going to have time to look down at that when you are diving hard into a corner in traffic?

And for a street car, I think average joe-schmoe would get too carried away watching the tach and trying to hit the perfect rev-match, and not be concentrating on what's in the road ahead of him. Then, he'll end up rear-ending the car in front of him.

If you really want to get carried away, I think Honda should put in an SMG transmission and have the computer do the rev-matching for you. Now that would be hot.

 

[QUOTE=mxt_77,Sep 27 2004, 09:45 AM]That's a nifty idea, but not useful for a racecar because when racing, are you really going to have time to look down at that when you are diving hard into a corner in traffic?

 

I agree that more is generally better, but if this was added, I think it would be more of a novelty item than an actual useful feature. But, as mentioned, it wouldn't be too difficult to implement, I'm sure. They'd just have to add some extra LEDs (or color-changing LEDs), and a sensor to determine which gear you are in currently. Add to that a little extra ECU code, and the magic would be done.

As long as it's defeatable, I wouldn't have a problem with it being there. I'd probably just turn it off, although I might leave it on just for show. I doubt it would really impact the way that I drive.
What I'd much rather have is datalogging capabilities and a non-proprietary interface for d/l'ing data from the datalogger. Now that's something that should be standard on a racecar inspired vehicle.