With the Nissan 370Z, heel-and-toeing goes the way of the fox trot
The heel-and-toe downshift -- whereby drivers "blip" the gas pedal with the blade of their right foot, revving the engine, while keeping pressure on the brake pedal with the ball of the same foot -- is becoming a lost art, a performance-driving shibboleth known to few and practiced by fewer.
This tap dance allows drivers to match the engine's speed, the rpm, with the rotational speed of the lower gear selected; otherwise, when the clutch is let out, the engine braking effect causes the car to stumble and slow down. If a car is already just hanging on, at the limits of tire adhesion, a badly muffed downshift will take weight off the rear end and cause a spin. As phenomenally brilliant a driver as I am, even I have experienced this a few hundred times.
Once, all drivers understood heel-and-toe. Manual gearboxes were "unsynchronized" and so, if you didn't rev-match the gears, you'd grind them marvelously. You also had to "double clutch," but that's another story. Heel-and-toe was cultural currency and automotive literacy, the stuff of plot points on the old radio cop drama "Calling All Cars." It was to driving what a proper fox trot was to the summer cotillion. Then synchronized manual transmissions became common and automatic transmissions commoner still. Today, only about 15% of the license-holding public knows how to drive a manual-transmission car. I'd estimate that only 1% know their heel from their toe.
Within the last decade or so, ultra-performance street cars with Formula One-style sequential gearboxes have dispensed with the foot-operated clutch altogether (Ferrari, I'm looking at you). During downshifts, the car's computers blip the throttle and electrically actuate the clutch mechanism in hundredths of a second for perfectly smooth, flawless rev-matching the likes of which Fangio could only dream of.
Then came paddle-shifted automatic transmissions that were nearly as efficient as sequential boxes but effortlessly smoother. And then cybernetically controlled dual-clutch gearboxes, such as the ones in the Bugatti Veyron or the new Porsche 911. Not only did fewer drivers need the heel-and-toe technique, there were fewer reasons to learn. Heels and toes were being lost like fingers at an Ozark sawmill.
