What Is Heel-and-Toe Shifting?
Heel-and-toe shifting is a technique used on cars with manual transmissions to help smooth out downshifts. It involves using the left foot for the clutch, with the right foot activating both the brake and gas pedal at the same time.
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It’s typically enforced when entering a corner, and although it was probably developed for racing, it can also be useful in regular driving.
How It’s Done
If you’re going down the road at 35 mph in 4th gear, your engine might be spinning at 2,000 rpm. But if you were doing 35 mph in 2nd gear, the engine might be at 3,000 rpm. Thus, if you wanted to shift from 4th to 2nd smoothly while maintaining 35 mph, you’d want to depress the clutch, shift to 2nd, then press on the throttle to bring the engine up to 3,000 rpm before releasing the clutch.
But what if you wanted to do the same thing while also braking, as you might when entering a corner? That would require using more pedals than you have feet.
In that case, you could use your right foot to press on the brake and gas at the same time. The traditional way to do this is by pressing on the brake pedal with your toes, then pivoting your heel over to the gas pedal — which is where the term “heel and toe” comes from. However, in many modern cars, you can press on the brake with the ball of your foot while pressing on the gas with the outside edge of your foot.
The sequence would be to press on the brake pedal with the toes of your right foot, depress the clutch with your left foot, shift to the lower gear while blipping the throttle with your right heel, then release the clutch.
If you don’t blip the throttle and you release the clutch when the engine rpm has dropped to idle (which it will after you take your foot off the gas and depress the clutch), the car will lunge forward as though you put on the brakes because the car’s momentum is being used to spin the engine up to speed.
Why It’s Done
In normal street driving — where the pace is more leisurely — the art of heel-and-toe downshifting isn’t really necessary. But in racing, it’s a different matter.
On the track, you typically want to have your “exit gear” engaged before you enter a corner, which means you have to downshift while you’re also hard on the brakes. If you downshift and release the clutch without matching your engine revs to your road speed, the car will rock back and forth, possibly causing it to lose traction and spin.
Rev-Matching
Some newer sporty cars with manual transmissions (which are becoming increasingly rare) have the ability to “heel and toe” for you. Referred to as rev-matching, the car’s computer knows how fast you’re going, and as soon as you engage a lower gear, it tells the engine to rev to the proper speed before you let out the clutch.
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