Technobabble: Your Mama Can't Drive

If you have wide feet and/or your cars pedal positioning allows it, you might find that this foot position works better, you brake with the ball of your foot and rock sideways onto the gas pedal to match revs

What the flyer never mentions is double-clutching. This is really an old-man's technique rendered virtually pointless by modern transmissions that actually work. The SMT MR-2 still does it, though, if you insist on downshifting into first gear. Double clutching is only really necessary if you don't have syncros, as was once common in the lower gears of the tractor-based sports cars of the British Empire, or if you have a worn out old Datsun with dead second-gear synchros.

Without synchros, you have to spin the input shaft to the same speed as the output shaft. This sounds like it would take lots of math and special tools, but really, it just takes the exact same blip you would use to pull off a smooth conventional downshift, just with the transmission in neutral and the clutch out. This connects the engine and transmission so your blip spins the input shaft.

Step by step? That's:

1-Clutch in
2-Shifter in neutral
3-Cltuch out
4-Blip
5-Clutch in
6-Shifter in gear
7-Blip again
8-Clutch out.

Oh, and you have to do all that in about a second.

If you really break it down, not all those steps are necessary. First, you don't really need to step on the clutch to get to neutral. If you just use a little throttle finesse to unload the transmission, (so the engine isn't driving the car and the car isn't driving the engine) the shifter will happily slide into neutral. Then, if you get that blip exactly right, there's really no reason you have to step on the clutch the second time. The engine speed needed to match the input and output shafts is exactly the same needed when you let out the clutch. If you really have the speed right, it shouldn't matter if there's an engine attached to that input shaft or not.

So that brings us to the O'Neil shift. Tim O'Neil preaches the gospel of left-foot braking, but when it comes time to downshift under braking, there's a serious shortage of feet on the pedals. Don't even think you're going to pull off some heel-toe maneuver with your left foot on the brake and clutch, your orthopedic surgeon will never forgive you. In nanosecond detail, an O'Neil shift goes like this:

1-Brake in a relatively straight line
2-Ease off the brakes momentarily
3-Turn the wheel
4-Tickle the brake pedal again to make the front tires bite and get the tail sliding
5-Now, as you're balancing the slide with the throttle and brake, wait for the precise moment you don't need the throttle to keep from hitting a tree or boulder or driving off a cliff, and feather the throttle for a fraction of a second.
6-In this moment of freedom, slide the shifter up toward the next lowest gear
7-Simultaneously roll into the throttle exactly the right amount to bring the shafts into synch as the shifter hits home.

Blammo, just like that you're down a gear and powering out of the corner in a cloud of dirt, gravel and glory without ever touching the clutch.

An O'Neil shift is something you do when winning means more to you than the bills for what you'll break if you don't do it right. I've managed two or three O'Neil shifts in my lifetime, all mere accidents when my overwhelmed cranium forgot to tell my left foot to go step on the clutch. At the top of his game, Tim O'Neil used to be able to get it right just often enough that he didn't need a new transmission until the end of the rally.

I'm not letting his mom anywhere near my mom.