Quote:
Originally Posted by Uber V8
What's funny is as complicated as this may read, you actually explained it very well and it makes sense. Do you know if they teach this at HPDE? I still enjoy my DCT downshifts especially with my recent ACM exhaust mod, but I can imagine it's more rewarding with a 6MT.
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Part of my job involves explaining technical concepts to non-technical people who need to make decisions about technical things, plus I dabbled in mentoring, tutoring, and teaching courses in high school and college, and now I instruct at HPDEs, so I can usually find a way to explain even difficult concepts in clearly understandable ways. In the HPDEs I've attended, rev matching and heel toe were mentioned in class but never really focused on, although classroom discussions are to some extent guided by what students ask to learn about anyway. An instructor might suggest focusing on it as well based on your driving and/or agree to work on it with you if you say that you'd like to learn it, but honestly I'd recommend practicing off track, at the very least for rev matching. You have to learn that before you can heel-toe, and I learned rev matching by just going out onto unoccupied public roads and trying the various downshifts (5>4, 4>3, 3>2) in the middle of straightaways where there was no upcoming corner to deal with and therefore nothing else to focus on and no consequence of getting the blip even horribly wrong. Compare that setting to the track, where you're coming up to a corner fast, braking hard, and thinking about a bunch of other things, all of which can cause you to get crossed up mentally and mess up the shift, and on track messing up the shift can mean spinning your car (from locking up the rear wheels due to insufficient blip) or overrevving your engine (from panicking while approaching the corner and shifting too early). But once you get a feel for rev matching, heel-toe actually IS easier to learn on track because as I mentioned above, that's where you press the brake down far enough to make that easier. Once you've learned it there, it's still possible on the road though; you just have to rotate your foot more and lean into the throttle more than you would otherwise. I learned heel-toe on the track and just came into corners that required shifts a bit more slowly than I would have otherwise while picking it up, but I had it down in a day or so -- but that was after I had practiced rev matching in the manner I described above.