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.
And now it's time to say the final misty and maudlin words over heel-and-toe. The 2009 Nissan 370Z is the first car to have a computerized rev-matching system -- called, awfully enough, "SynchroRev Match" -- in a conventional, H-pattern manual transmission. Gone now is the secret decoder ring of fast driving, the sacred handshake of the Clutch Brotherhood, the Esperanto of in-car footwork. Sic transit gloria heel-and-toe.
