Mastering Manual Driving: How to Change Multiple Gears At Once and Boost Performance
Today, I am going to share some stories about my driving experience with my lovely BMW. Most of the shareable stories are from my driving Point Of View mode.
I think you guys are learning about changing multiple gears in your daily driving car. Most importantly, it is only applicable to manual gear cars.
Sorry, Auto drivers—today is only for manual car enthusiasts.
All manual car lovers, let’s chill!
Block changing or skipping gears, from fifth down to second first, and then I’m just going to go directly up to third. It is the one thing that sets manuals apart from automatics. You can’t go from sixth to third in an auto; there is the potential to damage your clutch. We are going to go through skipping gears when changing down the box. Those two are very different. The way up is quite straightforward and simple; the way down is going to require some rev matching.
When coming out of a junction, you have to speed up to a certain speed. You might want to go from first to third, and then you can go from third to fifth. The reason this is really effective on upshifts is because cars are geared for fuel economy and acceleration, not necessarily for smoothness. The same is true for going down the box. I am in fourth now, and I want second when I slow down for a little speed bump.
I could go from fourth, then third, then second, as I have just done, but it’s not as smooth. There’s an extra gear change in the middle, so why not just go directly from the gear you’re accelerating into to the gear you want to cruise in!
When I take off first, nice and gently, I skip straight up to third. I use third all the way up, then I skip straight to fifth. This works really well if you’ve got a big engine. I don’t know if it’s as effective in a little 1-liter or 1.2-liter engine, or something like that.
Potentially not, but it works amazingly well if you’ve got a bigger engine with a lot of torque, like my car, which is powered by two turbos.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but it really does level up your smoothness when driving.
All of my examples are taken from my real-life experience. Through driving to and fro, I tested various kinds of experiments.
Once, I was driving on a highway beside my residence, and I was in fifth gear coming up to a roundabout. I dropped all the way to third, and now I probably have the right gear to take this left at the roundabout. It’s just really nice, really smooth, and then as I accelerate up the on-ramp, I am in third and going to hold this until I reach the speed I want.
Then I just drop it right into cruising gear, and it’s so nice. The reason it’s so smooth is because you don’t have those extra gear changes in between. You just hold the gear up to the speed that you’re looking for, and then you change into the gear you’re cruising at. It cuts out all the middlemen that are in between. You don’t get that with an automatic.
With an automatic gear, you have to go through all the gear processes inside the automated gearbox. There’s no way around it. You don’t have a choice. You can’t skip gears.
In a manual gear car, you can. It is just one way to elevate yourself when you’re driving a manual car. To all the people driving automatics and not really driving their cars—
I say that as a joke. I’m a big automatic lover. I think they are better than manuals, but this does make you feel good about yourself.
Right, enough talking about this from an everyday perspective.
Let’s shift gears when I get out onto some faster roads and talk about the spirited side of block changing gears.
From a spirited driving perspective, how should you look at block changing?
In normal driving, what you’re looking for is smoothness, and to an extent, you are looking for the same here. But what you are more so looking for are the times when block changing is incredibly effective—any time you just need a big amount of rev swing to get into the right power band.
So, say for example you’ve made a mistake and you’re entering a corner in far too high a gear. Maybe you thought it was a fifth-gear corner, but it’s actually more like a third-gear corner.
But you can go straight from fifth into third and then be in the right gear.
When changing speed limits: say this is a 30 mph road, but I am just about to enter a national speed limit. So I am going to have a big rev match from fifth down to second. Now I have some power to be able to get up to speed. Even here, I am in fourth. This is probably a second-gear corner. Block change, and we can rocket it around.
I have settled into a cruise again because I don’t want to decimate the speed limit. So I am in fifth at 60 mph. There are some sharper corners, so I drop it into third and get a bit more control for the corner.
It’s just one more tool in your arsenal. Block changing is also really good for making overtakes. Say you wanted to overtake, and you’re in sixth gear but don’t have the power. You could quite easily drop from sixth directly to third and then make your move. It’s almost like changing modes.
Right now, I am in sixth. I am cruising. As soon as I block change all the way down to third, I am immediately on the cusp of the car’s performance.
There’s just a lot more going on straight away. The car’s eager, it’s on its tiptoes, and now it’s ready to go. But once you go back to sixth, it’s cruising again. A few caveats: there are some things that you have to— and I mean have to— do when you’re going down the gearbox. With block changes, there has to be a rev match.
You can’t just engage the clutch, engage the new gear, and then dump the clutch. No, you are going to destroy your clutch. So you have to have a big rev match in between the gear changes.
If you go from sixth to third gear, you need to bring your revs up to where they should be at third.
If you’ve got a lot of gears in between, just leave a bit of a delay to let the gearbox catch up. It’s going to be a lot smoother.
If you are ham-fisted with that clutch and are dumping it in and out all the time, you are going to ruin it. But to be honest, that’s no different from downshifting one gear at a time because you’ve got to rev match those too. Same thing.