"Java Jive" <ja...@evij.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:t6qiki$s3j$1...@dont-email.me...
> [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".