How To Launch A Manual Transmission Car

hello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be learning how to launch a manual transmission vehicle and for this video I am going to be in the 2016 Volkswagen Golf R now we're going to work through the different steps and talk about you know some of the different situations you may be in in order to optimize your 0 to 60 launch as well as kind of how this system works in order to understand how to get a better time and so the first step and by far the easiest all you're going to do is press in the clutch and so you're going to want to be on a flat surface absolutely you're not rolling around anywhere at least for the start of this you want us a nice flat surface so the vehicle remains stationary as you press in the clutch even without your foot on the brake so that's step number one step number two is applying throttle and this is probably the most tricky of the entire thing so what you're going to do here is apply throttle and you're pretty much going to hold a set rpm and that's going to be based on many different parameters so if you have a very high torque engine then you're going to use a lower rpm if you have a very low torque engine typically with smaller engines then you're going to use a higher rpm now how much throttle you apply also depends on if the vehicle is front-wheel drive rear wheel drive or all-wheel drive front will require the least amount of torque in order to spin the tires so you can use a lower rpm but keep in mind the size of your engine now rear wheel drive can handle a little bit more so you may go higher but once again you know rear-wheel drive vehicles tend to be more powerful so you can use a slightly lower rpm and then all-wheel drive vehicles are able to put down the most power without a doubt and so you can get really high rpm without you know sacrificing the wheel spinning too much so because you've got a ton of grip you can use a ton of power and so with all-wheel drive systems typically you're going to be using the highest rpm possibly you know you can be up in the 4,000 5,000 6,000 rpm range whereas for a very powerful let's say you know v8 muscle car something like that you may only need like 2500 rpm in order to get those rear tires to spin if you go above that so it's all about making sure you don't have those rear tires spinning but you put down as much power as possible to accelerate into it now there's other factors to take into consideration as well so if it's raining outside clearly you're going to have less traction so you use a lower rpm another thing that's interesting is if you have a turbocharged engine so with the turbocharged engine basically if you hold it at a set rpm you're not going to be building any boost unless you have an anti lag system and so most cars don't come equipped with these and so because of that one way to kind of trick yourself out of this scenario is build it up to maybe two or three thousand rpm then floor it that gives resistance to the turbocharger builds up exhaust and as you're flooring it then you'll move on to the next step where you release the clutch and so that allows for you to build a little bit of boost and give you a little bit more torque to put down rather than just holding it at a set rpm now you have to time that really well in order for it to work right so it could be easier just to hold it at maybe 5,000 6,000 rpm let's say you're in an all-wheel-drive turbocharged vehicle let the clutch out and then go from there okay so moving on to point number three and this is where my props come in handy so we've got a clutch and a pressure plate so we have our clutch pressed in which means this is you know not in contact with the pressure plate we've now applied throttle so this is going to be spinning with our flywheel so this is going to be spinning at the RPM that you see on your tech ometer and so now you have a difference in speed because this is of course stationary as it's attached to your wheels and first gear so now what you want to do is release this and actually have this oriented the wrong direction but anyways you're going to have this coming here and so you're going to want to smoothly but fairly quickly release that clutch now if you do it too fast you'll notice what'll happen is it'll bog down the engine and what can happen is if you slam these together and you don't break your tires you're going to put all that strain onto your drivetrain and so the best-case scenario if you do it too quickly is that you just spin your tires the worst case scenario is you actually break something within your drivetrain so you don't want to do it too fast but you also don't want to do it too slow either so if you do it too slow what happens is this just starts spinning you start burning up your clutch and you're not putting that power down on to the ground so a nice smooth but fairly quickly release that so you have a nice easy pressure engage onto that clutch disc it brings it up to speed and then you start accelerating okay so that was step number three smoothly but quickly releasing your clutch and this leads us on to number four which is as we're releasing that clutch as it starts to grab you want to start to ease into the throttle so as you go into the release the clutch you're easing into the throttle so that you're accelerating once that clutch starts to grab now there's a couple things that can happen here so let's say you have wheel spin well it means you're either using too much rpm initially when you're holding the throttle or you're getting into that throttle too quick when you start to release the clutch or for example you're releasing that clutch too quickly and so any three of those can cause it the wheels to spin now on the other side let's say you release the clutch you don't get any wheel spin at all well it's probably possible to get a slightly faster lunge and so you're going to want to give it a little bit more throttle not only at Holden at a higher rpm but give it throttle quickly as you start to release that clutch and make sure you're releasing the clutch quick enough so you're not just burning up the clutch and instead you're putting that power to the ground okay well let's say you give it plenty of throttle and you release that clutch fairly slowly if you see high rpms but you're not actually accelerating so your rpms are way up you've let the clutch out completely and your speed isn't really moving much what's happening is you're just burning up your clutch and so you don't want to be doing that you want to make sure that you're actually accelerating rather than just burning up your clutch so in that scenario you're going to want to use less throttle initially and you're probably going to want for your clutch to cool off so it can actually grab okay so now we've worked through the first four steps in order to get the vehicle moving we've pressed in the clutch we've applied throttle and held that at a set rpm we've released the clutch smoothly but quickly and then we've modulated the throttle after releasing that clutch in order to control wheel spin and get the vehicle going so now we need to move on to step number five what comes next well we need to change gears so for the gear shift you know it will depend basically on the mapping of the engine the torque curve then itself is a topic for a whole different video a good rule of thumb that you can go with is to just carry it out all the way to redline and then shift gears so why do I say carry it out all the way to redline well you have to look at the torque characteristics of the transmission and the engine and with most vehicles you're put at a huge gearing disadvantage each time you step a gear down so when you go from first to second you lose torque through gearing so your wheel torque is going to be less now in the Volkswagen Golf R which we're in there's a 60% difference in the gear ratio between first and second gear so that means 60% less wheel torque once we go down the second gear from first and so even if the engine tapers off quite a bit at the end of its torque curve and the higher rpm as long as it doesn't drop between beneath 60% less then we're still at an advantage being in first gear rather than dropping down the second gear and for example this Golf R it carries peak torque it's actually pretty amazing from 1800 rpm to 5500 rpm with red line at about 6500 rpm and so that means in 1000 rpm you need to lose 60% of the torque which I don't believe will be happening and so because of that you know it's beneficial to just shift from first to second go all the way to red line go to red line again in second and then shift to third and so on you know depending on how much distance you have how long your straight is whether you're doing a quarter-mile or whatever and so from a gearing standpoint typically it's always going to be beneficial in a manual transmission to just take it all the way out to red line okay so we'll get a zero to sixty launch in I've got the traction control off so that that won't interfere at all will come to a stop hold the clutch down rpm up to about 5,000 a little past 5,000 rpm let the clutch out there's 61 so I might have been able to let the clutch out a little bit quicker other than that it seemed to do pretty well and I shifted a little late on the end of second gear there ran it out a bit too far but it looks like it did pretty well and the reason why I left it in 2nd up until redline 2nd gear actually takes it past 60 so you saw at the end there red 61 so I wanted to see maximum acceleration to 60 so I left it in 2nd gear there but overall I think that was pretty good a little tweaking with the start and a little tweaking with a shift and it be slightly quicker bring the revs a little over 2000 okay let's get a nice highway pull in here now getting the launch perfect will probably take several attempts because not only do you have to adjust for how your specific car behaves but you also have to adjust for ambient conditions so you may have to try several times in order to get it down just right and for those of you curious to know how much of an effect this downhill on-ramp has on the 0 to 60 time I have created a separate video to demonstrate and test how much of an effect that downhill grade has and certainly worth mentioning if you don't want bad stuff to happen to your transmission and your drivetrain then you probably should never launch your vehicle as it's very easy for it to cause damage you're going to have a lot of clutch wear and you could easily damage your transmission components if you don't actually have the wheel slip or the clutch slip and they take the brute of that force and so have fun enjoy yourself be safe and thank you all for watching if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below and welcome in this video we're going to be talking about heel and toe downshifting what it is and why it's done so first we're going to talk about the process itself how it's done and then we're going to look inside your transmission and talk about why this is done and really this is used to downshift while you're on the brakes so let's say you're coming into a corner you're on the brakes you want a downshift so you can exit that corner

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 4,254,000

Rating: 4.8083916 out of 5

Keywords: how to launch, manual transmission, 0-60 time, vw golf r, ford mustang gt, chevy camaro ss, subaru brz, subaru wrx, motor trend, car and driver, mazda mx-5, horsepower, torque, volkswagen, subaru, ford, chevy, vw, mazda, turbo, awd, V8, muscle car, engineering explained, stick shift

Id: 54I5RU-RNhQ

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/BrandanG]

I can relate to that Camaro SS launch. They do not need much engine speed to get going.

[u/Reverie_of_an_INTP]

I usually take 3-4 times longer letting out the clutch than he was. What's typical for every day driving?

[u/MahNilla]

Hey /u/blue_5ive this helps with when we were talking about launching the other day. I guess I was wrong about peak torque...from what he says the torque loss between gears does make it better to launch at a high RPM in 1st then closer to the peak torque like we were talking. He actually launched it closer to 5k RPM! to help build boost.

Pretty cool too that he was able to gain time on the major pulication's 0-60s in the WRX.

[u/Matt_OPEC]

Honestly, most times when I am launching my car I am not interested in the fastest time, rather the tire smoke so I get the revs up and let it rip.

[u/Lord_Giveth]

A really informative video. I usually just floor it and dump the clutch. Then quickly change to second, to minimise the wheelspin. This seems like a much more efficient way to get of the line!

[u/Elaborate_vm_hoax]

Another good video. I know he's not really focusing on reviews, but I'd love to see a rundown on the Golf R from his perspective.

[u/Schnabulation]

I would like to add something special with turbo'd manual cars: as the turbo can not build pressure while holding a certain amount of RPMs there is a little trick to circumvent this. Hold the car in about 3000 rpm and just half a second before you launch fully press the throttle (so the engine speeds up). While the rpm rise the turbo can and will build pressure. Now release the clutch.