Couple things here, all IMHO.
First, HT might as well be learned sooner rather than later. Not learning is, in essence, teaching yourself a bad habit.
Second, it's okay to practice HT in parts. Just sit in the car with it off and see if you can brake pretty hard and roll your foot enough to push the gas pedal a good bit. 25% travel is probably plenty. If you can do that, it's quite okay to try it with the engine running some. You don't need to bang the throttle enough to get limiter or even close. Just see that you can do it and what it feels like.
Also, most cars down like high performance downshifts to first gear even if you're REALLY good at HT. So don't practice with 2-1's until you're comfortable with 4-3 and 3-2. Those are generally fine.
As for "you don't need to do it", uh, whatever. If you don't do it then you are going to be in situations on track (I guarantee) where not doing it is being hard on your synchros at the very least. I also believe it's likely, should you end up actually racing wheel to wheel, where not being able to HT to get a shift done when you really want it done is going to hurt you.
Do I always do it? No. I'm pretty well practiced and sometimes I miss my blip. When I do, I simply wait a little bit and give the revs a better chance to match. I actually think doing THIS right can be a more complex maneuver than an instinctive HT would have been in many cases.
Practicing HT somewhere not on the road to start with is a good thing, IMHO. Most "day 1" race schools have an exercise where they do it (the Miller Motorsports Park school definitely does, Skip Barber did several years ago at least, the Spring Hill Mountain school does, and I'm sure others). You might consider asking for one of these schools as a gift. Sounds like one would be right up your alley right now. Spring Hill Mountain is outside of Vegas, so it should run through the winter.
These schools are all fairly expensive, so obviously may not be a great choice for everyone.
To see why you "need" HT, just rev out second gear somewhere safe, shift to third for a bit (get the clutch out happily, but don't accelerate), and then downshift back to second and let the clutch out. All that thrust forward you just caused was through the rear wheels only and could be quite annoying on track. So practice that same thing but instead of just letting the clutch out, blip the throttle and then let the clutch out in the lower gear. You'll see that you didn't get thrust forward as badly (if at all, if you blipped enough) and the car is still settled. Then you can add doing that while braking and using the roll-your-foot-sideways method. What I'm saying here is you don't HAVE to be on the brake pedal to feel the effect we're talking about. There's little reason to do it that way on track, but it's just a good intermediate step to help you feel what is going on and when and why you need that blip. IMHO, it's quite impossible to just go out on a clean piece of track and teach someone how to HT when they don't even understand WHY they need to do it.
--Donnie
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
You're going to probably get a lot of different responses.
