jonny330 wrote:
In reply to ransom:
Thank you for that explanation I never understood the reasoning behind the double clutch but that makes complete sense. I don't see how anyone can do that quick enough to be fast. It seems like a lot of work when trying to get around a track as fast as you can.
After using it on the street and at autocross, I was stunned when I did a track day and found out how long I spent on the brakes and how much time that gave me to do the downshifts. I mean, my E30s brakes were nothing to write home about, but with practice the operation becomes pretty quick, and as long as you can do it in the span of time that you need to be braking, it's not preventing you from doing anything else. As noted earlier, at this point it's so automatic that I have a hard time not double-clutching.
For autocross, it's definitely more of an issue: The smaller spread of speeds means the time spent braking is much shorter. Regardless of downshift technique, there are definitely times I'm faster bouncing it off the rev limiter for a moment rather than trying to get in an upshift and a downshift.
The lower gears are also much less forgiving about rev-matching than the higher gears, just because of the torque multiplication on engine braking or crank momentum. Trying to match revs to first gear in the time it takes to slow from 25 to 10 is hard...