Post by NYPost by Java Jive[Lest anyone mistakenly think I subscribe to this view, my mother was
a WAAF driving instructor during WW2, and was the best driver in the
family. I have made for our private use a map of the places we have
photos of taken during Scottish holidays, the southernmost ones are
Edinburgh and Dalry, the northernmost Gruinard Bay, featuring almost
everywhere in between, though not the east coast, and of course we
usually drove up from southern England to get there. Only now does it
strike me how many hundreds of miles Ma, and later my stepfather, must
have driven on these family holidays.]
And she'll have been taught (and taught others) to drive vehicles with
no synchromesh, and therefore to perform double-declutching. Anyone who
can master that skill deserves much kudos. Nowadays it is impossible to
learn true DDC to non-synchromesh standards because (virtually) all cars
on the road today have synchromesh on all gears so you have no way of
knowing whether or not you have matched the engine and gearbox speeds
sufficiently accurately for the gear to engage. No matter what you do,
you can always *engage* any gear - you could engage first at 70, as long
as you don't let the clutch up!!!!! Good drivers try to match the speeds
when bringing up the clutch *after* the gear had successfully engaged,
so both plates are going at the same speed, but that's a very different
thing. Clutchless gearchanges can be mastered, but in that case you have
instant feedback: until you reach the matching speed, the gear will not
engage; once you reach the right speed it slips in. In DDC, you are
doing it offline: you have to hope that the engine speed is correct,
then disengage the engine (so you've no way of making minor tweaks), and
if it doesn't work you have to let the clutch up, tweak the engine
speed, declutch and try again: effectively you've got a system with a
delay in its feedback loop.
I did once have the misfortune to be a passenger in a car driven by
someone who had been driving for probably 20 years (she was not a new
driver) and she had the habit of coming right off the power, engaging
the new gear, letting the clutch up on an idling engine (with one hell
of a lurch!) and then applying power. I'd only been driving a few years
but I'd been taught the rudiments of rev-matching by my instructor (ex
police Class 1 instructor) who was keen to show newly-passed drivers how
to do it "properly". Should I say anything? After she apologised after a
particularly bad lurch, I very tactfully suggested that maybe there was
another way (I avoided the word "better"!) which might reduce the
lurches. She thought it was her car and asked me to drive to see.
Allowing for a couple of minutes to get used to a strange car's clutch
bite point and graunchy gear-selection, I drove it "differently" and she
was mystified. Without saying "this is how you should do it", I
described what I did, and there was a wonderful moment of realisation
and frustration "Ah, I didn't know you could do that". Without a
rev-counter, it's a bit more difficult to judge the correct engine speed
(with my present car I know that each change of gear is roughly an
increase/decrease of 500 rpm) but you can still do it my engine note -
at the very least keep the engine revs constant, and ideally increase
when changing down or decrease when changing up... anything but let the
engine revs fall to idling and let the clutch up on a "dead" engine.
There was an age and seniority issue (she was my manager) which is why I
was bending over backwards to be tactful and to avoid her feeling silly.
Next time I rode with her, she was fine, and she joked that she'd been
practicing. So it wasn't "typical woman driver" - it was just that she
had been taught very badly and had never experimented with doing things
differently to what she'd been taught. She was a people manager rather
than an engineer - maybe my scientific/engineering background made me
more likely to experiment "what if".