^you basically felt the car stalling because your gear is too high.. to be able to turn the car at 4th or 5th gear, you are either going extremely fast.. or you'll come out of the turn stalling (kinda what you just described).

I downshift to 3rd for most of my green light turns... 2nd if it's red and I slowly roll through the stop (without cops of course). I would downshift and rev match to 4, then to 3, then to 2 if needed, and turn..

I think the only time I ever skip gear is when I slowly roll to a stop while in gear (say in 5th gear).. then lights turn green when i'm still rolling.. the speed is too low for 4th, I'd do a little rev match and go to 3rd gear.

this is all from personal driving experience.. I can't say it's 100% correct.. but I've taught myself to drive stick for 6 years now and my car has yet to blow..

 

btw a little off topic.. for you guys that can heel toe, do you guys have large shoes or what? Either I'm not getting the techniques right.. or my feet are too small. (size 9 converse shoes). I can't seem to reach both pedals with 1 foot.

still trying to learn heel toe, considering buying some water slip resistance large pedals

 

just skip

 

Thanks for the answers guys appreciate it. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I don't want to just learn to drive manual, I want to be good at it too.

I'm a pretty small guy, I wear size 8.5 or 9 sometimes and I can reach the gas very easily. Not all cars are going to be set up well for heel toe. My barkes and gas pedals are even leveled and very close to each other. I actually use the side of my heel to blip.

 

Sharp turns in 5th? No. And I don't actually trail-brake as much in the X as I have had to other cars. But I do end up completing down-shift while turning quite often, which is part of why I wanted new seats so I could heel-and-toe (which is really side-of-foot/side-of-foot for me) more easily.

My general point was that doing all braking before turn-in, holding speed in a constant-radius corner, and then only feeding in power when you're done turning is not even close to the fastest way to drive, especially in an AWD. Good turns often involve braking at turn-in, which can drop you from one gear's power-band to the one below it, requiring a down-shift. You cannot complete the down-shift in advance because you're still going too fast for the lower gear. You won't be able to re-engage the lower gear until you're in the corner, which is why being able to blip the throttle while braking is a very useful skill.

 

Some heel to toe action or should I say side to side from one of my favorite F1 drivers ever:

 

Piffle. Senna was great, of course, but not the kind of person to emulate if you own an Evo X. You need folks who both heel-and-toe and left-foot brake. While the video below is not the best (I'm at work and shouldn't be doing this), it shows what I mean. In a nutshell, Senna's left foot wasn't doing enough work in the video above.

 

This may be a bit OT (but I'm a mod, so...)....

Many years ago, when I first became serious about driving, I was given what seemed like a very strange piece of advice about heel-and-toe downshifts and left-foot braking: do more sit-ups. I almost replied with "the reason that I race cars instead of bicycles (which I did in the 70s) is because I don't like working out." But then I thought about it some more and soon realized that the person was correct.

To be able to modulate the brake while simultaneously swinging your heel around to the gas you must be able to hold your right leg off the floor. If you are also using the clutch at the same time, you must be able to hold both legs off the floor, at least for a moment, without this affecting the ball of your right foot on the brake. Well, that takes some tummy strength.

On the street, before you start to try heel-and-toe, you can get yourself ready by getting your heel off the floor when you brake (with your right foot). It needs to be a habit. You want it so that you can swing your heel over without shifting your foot on the brake. If you normally put your right foot on the brake pedal in a position that makes it impossible to swing your heel over, then dump that habit immediately ... before starting to heel-and-toe. You should not have to plan whether you are going to heel-and-toe in advance; you shouldn't have one foot-on-brake placement for plain braking and another one for downshifting. You should have consistent foot-placement for all types of turn.

And do more sit-ups.

 

Try some wider shoes. Converse are a bit narrow. Personally when I need a wider shoe I either use Piloti's or if you want a less expensive shoe try DC shoes. Most skateboarding shoes may look puffy on the top but offer a lot of feel in the sole like your converse. When skate boarding you need to feel the board.

 

That is great advise that you need core muscles the more advanced your driving gets (better seats and belts too).... I did find another exercise that is just as effective as sit ups but a lot more fun. Karting! Not your local kid karts tho any are fun but I'm talking about the ones you need a drivers license to race or at your local race track. Most of those places also hold karting leagues, which is your best bang for the buck! A bit of a warning to first timers you're car will feel very weird on the way home so leave it all on the track

 

Oh, I can think of an exercise for tummy muscles that is a heck of a lot more fun than karting, but this site is open to users who are younger than 18, so I won't mention it by name.

 

...when i used the word coast I said coast in gear as in no feet on any pedal, clutch out. I instruct for HPDE days and I'm surprised had how many people want to ride the clutch or disengage it in turns. If you're not at a stop the clutch should be engaged with the trans in gear.

 

Yep. My small experience doing any kind of instructing suggests that people who go any distance with the clutch down were really in the middle of a downshift that they could not complete because they couldn't get their heel swung over for the blip. They are hard on the brakes and don't dare come off the clutch in the new, lower gear, because they are (rightfully) afraid of upsetting the car. The little added "brake" from re-engaging in the lower gear (while hard on the brakes) might be too much, so they just leave the car out of gear, wait for the right foot to be done braking, and then rev-match and re-engage with their right foot now only on the gas.

It's better than crashing, but not the way to leave a corner, especially not in an AWD that is designed to leave the corner better than any other car on the track with you.

You gotta be able to complete your shifts in the turn and be all set to get out of the turn as soon as you start unwinding the wheel. Hence, a two-page and growing thread on hell-and-toe.

 

If you can't teach yourself to heel-and-toe, you might want to think about a finger-blipper (tm) on the gear-shift knob, since we do have throttle-by-wire. It's not legal in any form of sanctioned racing, but it's fine for open-track and messing around.

 

I wanted to get into karting.... guy around here locally goes and has a nice kart. Just can't get past the entry costs when it would just mean more go-fast parts on the X.

Is it really that fun? Sorry to further derail.