Heel-toe struggles

[HKusp]

HB makes an excellent point about cars being deliberately setup for engine braking. Although the braking force it provides is small compared to the actual brakes, there's margin left in the rear axle in order to make sure the car is balanced front to rear while braking hard in gear with the engine high in the rev range as it should be on a track. And again it's not a lot of margin, if you try to add 3000RPM to the engine with that margin instead of doing a throttle blip, you will cause the rear axle to briefly lock up if you're braking as hard as you should be before corner entry.

That's another reason why I'm so bothered by the Steeda video, the guy is holding the clutch pedal completely to the floor for like half a second every time he downshifts. So he's just braking and coasting that whole time.

Just as a sanity check, I went out on my lunch break and heel-toed the truck to see how hard it is.

Yup, still works.

"If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!"

Those are some wide-ass feet!! Lol.

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[Lorne34]

I purchased the Xeneering Blip Module for my 350 as I simply wanted to focus on learning the track and having fun. I only track about 2-3 times per year and mostly at Road America where the speeds are very high and I've learned how to brake properly on the straights and execute the downshifts (with the help of the blip module) without upsetting the car.
If you want to improve lap times and really get into the sport then H/T would be a needed skill to learn. I'm not sure how many years I am going to continue to do track days.
As i said, I just want to go fast, have fun and not damage the car. The blip module allows me to do that. It's never failed to execute properly when using a combination of brake/clutch.
On the street I use throttle blip only down shift rev match if needed... never H/T as I am never going that fast when coming up to an intersection that I need to brake and heel/toe. I just leave myself plenty of margin. I should probably learn how to heel/toe in regular spirited driving.. maybe when I am fully retired I will have the time.

 

[Spart]

Those are some wide-ass feet!! Lol.

There's a little bit of camera trickery going on due to the upright seating position in my truck making the angle funny, but yeah they are a wide sized Asics.

The worst thing is I have heard constantly that people "can't heel-toe" because they have wide/big feet. Those conversations usually go like this:

Chum: Man I wish I could heel-toe, but my feet are too wide.
Me: Man that must suck, especially when the pedals are cramped. Must be easy to accidentally hit two pedals at the same time.
Chum: Yeah, that's really annoying when that happens.
Me: Right so now do it on purpose and you're heel-toeing.
Chum: SurprisePikachu.jpg

A lot of these people just have excuses, they don't actually want to learn.

 

[exvette]

2016 occasional track car and I’m struggling to perfect heel-toe downshifting.

My leg is too long for actual heel-toe with the pivot. My knee hits the steering column if I twist my leg counter-clockwise like that.

So I’ve been trying to get the ankle roll method to work, tilting the right side of my foot over to blip the throttle. But the gas pedal is too far away to reach. Nylon spacers didn’t help so removed them

I then installed the Steeda heel-toe gas pedal and that helped but created a new problem - now I can’t go full brake without accidentally pushing the gas pedal as well.

Has anyone successfully worked through this? What did you do?

try moving your right heel a little to the left. a trick I learned at Spring Mountain

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