Before you can teach a kid to drive a clutch you have to observe your own techniques more closely than usual--that which you do instinctively may not be something you’ve broken down into its component parts lately.
It took me a bombed session or two with the first kid before I observed myself.
Now I’ve learned to describe the technique as a subtle balance between pressing the accelerator and releasing the clutch. Have you ever noticed? It’s the clutch which controls your initial acceleration in first gear--not the gas.
Daughter #1 got the hang of it, and was turned loose once she’d passed “The Hill.” That’s a rite of passage where we start at the bottom of an abandoned marina driveway and climb up, in 20 foot increments, starting on a significant incline each time.
Daughter #2 was somewhat vexed by my dogged insistance that our “extra car” must be a stick--but given a choice between Little Blue--the manual transmission Subaru Outback, and a clunky, dinged minivan, her motivation to learn has materialized.
Our first session today was, well, not half bad. A big point I’ll need to make tomorrow is that if you’re off to a shaky start, you need to hit the clutch again before the car’s tremors hit 8 on the Richter scale. I’m hoping the Community College will be sufficiently neglected by its often obnoxious Public Safety dudes tomorrow--Easter Sunday, that we can take advantage of the emptiness to actually hit 3rd gear a few times. Our local community is, unfortunately for this pursuit, too hilly and curvy to get an inexperienced shifter out of 2nd.
And then--The Hill. After which, the spouse gets his dinged minivan back.
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