Advanced driving: How to 'heel & toe' gear change (racing downshift) | Auto Expert John Cadogan

In this report: How to be a proper cog-swapping Yoda. A ratio changing Jedi. This is the beginner’s guide to heel-and-toe downshifting like a ninja, with full race-driving tumescence and pike. Yesssss!

Racing-style heel-and-toe downshifts are the pinnacle of manual-driving mastery, in my view. They’re hard to learn, but easy to do. It’s all about the software upstairs and the muscle memory down there. It’s about overcoming a systematic deficiency in the nature of downshifting with a manual gearbox - the inherent prejudice in the fundamental design, which favours the upshift.

For ordinary driving it probably you certainly don’t need to know this. In traffic it’s not such a disadvantage, not being able to shift back to a lower gear at reasonably high revs - at least not being able to achieve this easily or in a dignified way.

But if you’re interested in performance driving - and I don’t mean driving like an absolute anti-social dick on a public road; I mean being able to make your car perform up to the limits of its capabilities - then you need to know this.

It’s like a pilot knowing how to fly a loop or a stall turn - you don’t usually do that at cruising altitude, while the hosties are serving breakfast. But knowing how - deep-down, hard wired, like riding a bike … it makes you a better pilot. This is like that, with driving.

If you are braking on the way into a bend, the speed and the engine rpms are falling. When you negotiate the bend, you clip the apex, you need to start start applying power and unwinding the steering. At some point you want a significant amount of acceleration, depending on how much traction you have underfoot.

And the only way to deliver a lot of acceleration is a lot of engine power, and that only occurs at high rpms. So you need to be in a suitably low gear. And that means downshifting at reasonably high revs.

So you need to brake on the way in, and downshift, and get the revs up by blipping the throttle, and if you want to do this like a proper manual-driving ninja, you blip during a double-de-clutch, while braking - effectively blipping the engine with the clutch engaged (ie - foot off) while in neutral.

You need to operate all three pedals contemporaneously, and independently. And do all the normal spatial perception stuff that cornering demands.

Learning this is hard, because there are a lot of moving parts. There’s the usual demands of cornering - getting the speed and steering right, plus the brake manoeuver, without which you’re potentially not getting around. Then there’s the multitasking with the right foot, the rev-matching and the double-de-clutching.

Nobody does this perfectly out of the blocks. It’s enough to give you an intracranial bleed - at least that’s how it feels. The only other thing I’ve had to learn that was this demanding was panel operating and presenting in a radio studio - which is like heel-and-toeing for six hours straight. But at least if you crash there, the studio doesn’t get torn in half by a tree...

So my strong advice is not to learn this while rolling up to a tight right-hander at 100 kays an hour. Complete cognitive overload if you try that - and way too risky. And you don’t want that.

So break it down. Start with the engine off, in the driveway. Practice the physical moves - The hands and the feet. Positive engagement with the brake. De-clutch, shift to neutral, roll and blip (while maintaining positive brake engagement). Come off the throttle as you de-clutch again, and shift down. Foot off the clutch, gently off the brake, gently on the gas (imagine the apex flashing past) - more acceleration, unwind the steering. Beautiful.

Remember that the goal here is ‘smooth’ - not ‘fast’. And to get ‘smooth’ you have to go slow. But this is entirely OK because - at the risk of sounding like friggin’ Yoda - slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. You get fast by going slow and smooth - that’s how this works.

If you spend about 20 hours practicing this you’ll find yourself on the way into some bend at 3000 rpm in third, and that heel-and-toe will just come out of nowhere. The gear lever will just fall into second. You’ll clip the apex at 4000rpm and it’ll feel awesome.

The bad news is that in order to feel this way, you’ll need to feel like an un-coordinated spastic for about three or four hours. Plus another three or four of feeling like you’ll never be able to get this right.
As is the case with learning anything worthwhile. Good luck.