One of the elements of racing a manual transmission car that we don’t spend near enough time talking about is the footwork that must happen in order to make the best shifts up and down through the rev range. Road course guys have this stuff down to a literal science and we’re about to take you on a ride with a driver hustling a car around Sears Point in 1994. That driver is Ricky Rudd and the car he’s driving is his Tide sponsored NASCAR racer. Before the days that clutchless transmissions were allowed on these courses, the drivers had to really work to make sure they did not mangle the gear boxes in the cars and that is exactly what we see Rudd do here.

He’s heel toeing, he’s working the brakes with aplomb, and he’s whacking the clutch pedal every time the shifter moves to select a higher or lower hear. In short, he’s doing a lot of stuff we don’t even associate with NASCAR drivers when they are on an oval and have the car plugged into high gear for the majority of the time.

We have tons of respect for anyone who is a professional race car driver because that’s a level of skill and bravery we have not achieved and likely never will. We have even more respect than that for the old timers who did not have the luxuries of the technology that’s packed into cars of all shapes and sizes today. Not that this was forever ago, but 23 years in racing parlance is a long ass time. Rudd’s car may have been more advanced in the suspension and powertrain departments than the guys who were racing 20 years before him but we’d bet you bucks to donuts that the process he is using to drive the car properly is damned near identical to the guys who were doing this back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s!