I’m doing a lot of reading recently on sports cars, due to my current mania that strikes every year around this time. One term that keeps coming up is heel-and-toe shifting. What is it?
Elvis’s link is a good explanation. The essential step is sliding the heel over onto the accelerator pedal to blip the throttle, so engine speed more or less matches transmission speed.
The thing of it is, I downshift and use the brake before entering a turn. I don’t need to brake and rev at the same time. Seems awkward. (But I’m not a racer.)
Depending on the transmission (especially in some race cars), you need to blip the accelerator in order to engage the lower gear at all. So, any time you’re downshifting while breaking you need to “heel/toe” it. (Or, if you have big feet like me, sort of “side foot/side foot”). I learned how to do it when I lost the clutch in my VW bug in the middle of baja, with 24 hours of driving left to get to San Diego.
Double-clutching. I did it in my old MGB, and I’ll do it in my ‘new’ old MGB. Still, I never had to brake and shift at the same time. (FWIW, the MG transmission only lacked synchromesh in first; so I’d only have to double-clutch when coming to a stop.)
Note (in case you want to try it) that most cars have pedals that are not designed to perform heel-and-toe.
From my experience I have found that the ideal pedal layout should be like this:
a) Small distance between brake and gas pedals
b) Brake pedal must be slightly raised relative to gas pedal
c) Brake pedal must not have much travel distance.
Try to find some Best Motoring videos. They always put a camera showing the feet of the drivers.
The heel on gas, toe on brake if fine for street cars but would be a pain in a race car. The one time I drove a racecar on a road course in competition, I moved the gas pedal back about 3" to bring if just a bit aft of the brake pedal. I was then able to heel brake, toe gas and it was very easy to do. Braking with your heel is much easier that with your toes. I must had did something right, I didn’t run into anyone and had a top 10 finish till I blew a tire on the last lap. The NASCAR guys will be on road course next month and they always put a couple of cameras in cars that show the drivers footwork.
Only two feet? Elvis, how many feet do you have?
How does one go about ‘racing’? When I get the B back, I think it would be fun to try some autocross or something. I’d really like to take it on a road course, but I don’t want a roll bar and it wouldn’t be competitive in stock form anyway.
Autocross is a great deal of fun and is a good place to start if you want to try out performance driving. Anyone can do it in their everyday car as long as it’s in good working condition. No rollbars or extra safety equipment needed (well, except for a helmet, but autocross events normally have loaners that you can use). Check out www.autocross.com for info and to look up local clubs and events. If you haven’t already, you can go to an event just to watch. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll find lots of people there who’ll be happy to give you pointers on how the events work, things to focus on when driving the course, etc.
racer72 can no doubt offer more info than I can, but there’s no way you can just casually ‘race’ your car (i.e. compete on a track against other cars). A full roll cage (not just a roll bar) would be just the beginning of the modifications you’d need to make to your car, along with driver training. Cars that are modified for racing (even in ‘stock’ classes) are generally not very suitable for day-to-day street driving. They have roll cages, racing seats, stripped out interiors and very stiff suspensions. On top of that, of course you don’t want to deal with the very real possibility of seriously damaging your car when you’re going to need it to get to work on Monday. 
It’s a hobby that can get quite expensive.
There are a number of performance driving schools that allow you to run your own car on a road course. Many of them do require roll bars for convertibles, but some do not. Although you’re on the track with other drivers, you’re not racing against them. You get instructors driving along with you for part of the time as well as classroom time. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, but of course it’s a lot more expensive than autocrossing (it’s a lot cheaper than actual racing however).
Thanks, Santos. I’ve e-mailed Chuckanut Sports Car Club.
On heel-toe technique: on the racetrack, when you’re coming to the end of a straight you want to brake in as short a period as possible, and as soon as your braking is done, be in the proper gear and ready to apply the throttle instantly. When you started braking, you were probably in top gear, and you may need to be in second to get through the turn. So you have to simultaneously brake and downshift to the lower gear.
So you’re braking and approaching the turn-in point. As soon as you depress the clutch pedal, the engine will drop to idle, and if you just jammed the shifter into the lower gear and pulled out the clutch (without touching the throttle), the engine would be revved up to a speed that matches the wheels (which are still going pretty fast). This could mechanically over-rev the engine and damage it (worst case), or cause your rear wheels to skid, leading to a spin, or just seriously overstress the clutch and tranny.
So you want to rev the engine up to the middle of its rev range, at roughly the point that matches the speed you want to be at when you get off the brakes. This is rev-matching. And you need to keep braking the whole time.
For most drivers in most cars, “heel-toe” is a misnomer. I put my toes on the right side of the brake pedal and, while applying brake, roll the ball of my foot over to the left edge of throttle pedal to blip it. You quickly run it up to, say, 6000, and let go, then as the revs fall, pull out the clutch to smoothly match the speed you need. Off the brake, and power through the turn. Presto. You’re a race driver!
It takes a while to master, but you can practice on the street almost any time you go around a corner. But it’s really a track technique. If all you’re doing is street driving, it’s hardly a necessary skill. Guys who do it on the street are just showing off.
As for driving on race tracks, look into High Performance Driver’s Education (HPDE). For the last five+ years it’s been my main hobby, and I’ve been instructing for the last year. You drive your regular street car on various racetracks around the country. You’re learning and using race driving techniques, but it’s not a competition. There’s no timing, and passing other cars is only permitted in the straightaways and only when the car you’re passing gives you a sign.
Typically you’ll have 3-5 track sessions of 20 to 40 minutes each on a typical track day. If you think that doesn’t sound like much time, you have no idea of how much exertion is involved in this kind of activity. I get home after a day at the track completely exhausted. It’s great fun.
Interested? I highly recommend the National Auto Sport Association. It’s a great organization that runs safe, well organized events at tracks all over the country. Their Web site has lots more info about how HPDE works.
Or you can use this track locator to find a track near you (it has to be a road course–yellow dot), visit the track’s Web site and see what HPDE events are on its schedule. Or check out your local BMW, Audi, or Porsche car club (you don’t have to own one of those cars to participate).
If you have a convertible, you will probably need a roll bar, but various organizations have different requirements.
Don’t be scared: newbies ride with instructors to acquaint them with the basics. It’s safe, and as we often say, the most fun you can have with your pants on.
I drove one season in what is now the Raybestos Brakes Northwest Tour. These are tube chassis, fiberglass bodied oval track race cars that are occasionally put on road courses. In fact, the Southwest Tour will be at Infineon Raceway with the Nextel Cup guys next month. I ran the 1988 season driving a Howe chassised 1988 T-Bird. We ran one race at Portland International Speedway, we were the support race for the Cart series.
My Dad talked about heel-toeing in his old MGB and Spitfires, there was more room (or the pedals were better shaped) for doing this.
The pedals on my Mum’s Civic seem to stop me trying this (that and a desire not to destroy the only car on the planet I’m insured to drive 
)
I’ve been reading a lot about clutches a while ago, and from what I understand, rev-matching the clutch and the flywheel during downshifts would reduce wear even in modern cars, though how much difference this would make on the durability of the clutch and flywheel, I have no idea.
The long and short of it, as I see it. . .you only really need to brake and rev at the same time if you’re really trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of a corner.
When I’m downshifting around a corner that I want to speed out of, I’ll blip. Sometimes double-clutch.
If I’m downshifting for a mellow reason. . .slowing to a stop or getting on an off-ramp or something, I like to double-clutch it. It’s mostly just for something to do, but it is a bit smoother than “blipping”. And really once you get used to it, it’s as second-nature as shifting.