Driving Stick Behind Slow Drivers... Tips?

[sn00pie]

Sounds like your letting go of the clutch too fast. Let the car in front of you move far enough so you have a good distance to start moving. Once your good at it, it all becomes fluid and natural. Put an exhuast on your car. People never drive slow infront of me when they hear my straight pipe bad boy in their rear view mirror :shiftyninja:

[Tumble]

think thats hard? try stopping at a light on a bridge when the car behind you decides to get right up underneath you... sorry buddy, i rolled back and my hitch seems to have put a nice gash in your hood. not my problem.

just one of the positive things about driving a lifted jeep, cars seem to fit right under your bumper so you never really have to worry about getting asspacked when you've got a hitch in.

what i've learned to do in your situation, is wait about 5 seconds for the person in front of you to start off, judge and then get the car to start moving in 1st with the clutch all the way out, then just let off the gas until they get moving. just float right behind them.

[TAZMINATOR]

You want tips eh? [thinking] ah.. got an idea... why don't you roll your window down and make siren sound out of your mouth as loud as you can. So those slow drivers will move out of your way. :whistle:

[.bin]

Protip: (Do at least try this!) ... when you're in first slowly let your clutch out, you'll start to feel the engine "wind" up and the revs should drop from idle around ~500 revs. You can then start accelerating slowly whilst pulling your foot off the clutch more. This ensures a great start without all the "chugging", so to speak. Good luck. :woot:

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

I just purchased my second car, a 2002 Mazda Protoge5 which has a manual transmission. My first car on the other hand was an automatic, so my experience with standard trans is very low at this point, so I'm looking for a few good tips.

So I'm still playing around with starting in first gear and getting a smooth acceleration, but for the most part I'm ok with it; the odd time however, I have rough start. Now, I've run into a few situations where I'm stopped at a red light with one car ahead of me, and when the light turns green, the driver ahead of me starts moving EXTREMELY slowly and keeping at an incredibly low speed with little to no acceleration, seriously, they only drive at about 10 km/h for a good 30 sec. Now, what I want to know is, what's the best way to drive stick in a situation like this without having the car jerk around a bit? The reason I ask is because I can't seem to get a smooth accel since I'm not able to give it too much gas. Any tips?

Use the first gear just to get the car moving and switch to the second gear shortly after.

When you drive in really heavy traffic (5-20 km/h), try switching between the second gear and neutral back and forth. Assuming you are on a straight road, just put on the second gear for a few seconds to get the momentum going and then put it back on neutral; the car will roll on its own and then just use breaks if you need to and put it back to second gear when you need to accelerate the car a bit again.

p.s. this is probably one of the best exercises to learn the manual transmission: park your car on a hill on your way up; use the hand break. To get the car moving, at first while you just practise, you'll need to be slowly releasing the hand break and the clutch at the same time to catch the momentum with your foot-throttle. Once you master this, you'll be doing this in no time and drive like a pro ;)

p.s.2 basically, you just need to experiment to get the feel for the manual transmission. Try going slow on your second/third gear and when the engine starts to "choke" while the car is decelerating - it means you have to put a lower gear on. It's the same thing with the acceleration; it's just the opposite. When you feel that the engine becomes too "sensitive" to your foot-throttle and the car "jerks" when you apply your foot on the throttle, it means you should be driving on a higher gear.