By this point, I’d gotten pretty comfortable with driving on track, and I’d started getting a little full of myself.
“Hey, maybe I’m actually getting pretty good at this.”
Then one day, I got the chance to have BJ drive my Roadster, which gave me a chance to see just how much of a difference there was between us.
He beat me by two seconds.
Two seconds!
On a track where a lap takes just over a minute, that’s a huge difference.
I looked at the logger data and found differences all over the place, but one of the biggest was the time it took us to shift up.
It took me about a full second to upshift, while BJ could do it in less than half that time.
What?!
It was that different?
I’d always had this idea in my head that you were supposed to wait until the engine speed had dropped sufficiently before engaging the clutch during an upshift.
So this was a real shock.
If you spend too long shifting and interrupting acceleration, the speed difference created during that interruption remains for the rest of the lap.
When that happens several times in a single lap, it adds up to a surprisingly large difference.
The next day, I tried practicing on public roads, but I couldn’t really get the feel for it unless I was at full throttle.
So I went back to practicing it on track.
I was nervous that I might mess up and break the transmission.
But after practicing over and over, I eventually got my upshifts down to about 0.5 seconds.
And my lap times improved noticeably, too.
Oh, so that’s what it was. Idiot!
Lesson Learned
Upshifts should be as quick as possible, too.