Originally Posted by
rotarykidd
a good way to learn when your clutch starts to engage is to sit in a parking lot, put in first, and SLOWLY let out the clutch pedal. once you feel the car start to inch forward or bog down, then you know when your clutch starts to engage. at that point start to give it some gas. keep practicing this and youll get a "feel for your pedal" in no time. try feathering the accelerator pedal as well. the trick is knowing when your clutch starts to engage, before long youll find the sweet spot.
I would take this a step further.
Find a hill.
Figure out how to get the car up the hill. Start at the base of the hill, on the flat part. That way you aren't fighting the hill to get the moving, but it will help keep the car from launching forward if you gas it too hard. Once you get the car moving up the hill, put the clutch in, roll backwards and do it again. As you get better, you'll be able to do each "rep" more quickly. This is to get your throttle foot and your clutch foot and brain all working together, so instead of thinking "slowly let the clutch out and add an equal amount of throttle while keeping an eye on the RPMs until the car gets moving" you can get to the point of just thinking "clutch and go" (this is the practice makes perfect part everyone talks about)
Then figure out how to keep the car from rolling backwards when on the hill. Get the car up on the hill so it wants to roll backward. I found the easiest way to do this was to get to the top of the hill and let the car start to roll backwards. Slowly. Then use the throttle and clutch to "catch" the car and start moving forward again. Do this again and again until you really get the hang of it. The better you get, the further down the hill, and therefore the faster you can roll. The first "exercise" taught you how to get the car moving. This is supposed to teach you the relation to clutch and throttle. The faster the car is moving backwards, the more throttle you're going to need to recover. But you don't want to burn your clutch up, so you're still going to have to get off the clutch pedal quickly.
Then figure out how to drop the parking brake while clutching and gassing to go from a stop on the hill, to moving forward. This pretty much takes the first two and puts it into more of a real world application. You'll never have no one in front of you and no one behind you. There are lots of other people on the road. Lots of other things going on all at once. This exercise simulates that. You have to learn how your car is going to respond and what you need to do about it so you don't launch up and hit someone's rear end, and so you don't roll back into someone behind you. Do this on different parts of the hill so you have varying forces on the car.
You don't want to practice letting the clutch out "slower" to make the transition smoother. riding the clutch out is a bad (and costly) habit. Not only do you look like an idiot holding 2,500 RPMs and riding the clutch through the intersection, but burning the clutch up like that dramatically shortens the clutch life. Instead, you want to smooth it out with throttle input and proper clutch timing.
You should pretty much be totally off of the clutch within a car length.
you just need to get it enough throttle input to keep the RPMs from bogging down below idle.
Someone suggested bumping the throttle instead of one solid motion. That isn't a bad idea either. At least until you get the hang of using the clutch.
good luck