At my second race weekend, a Feb. Sebring regional 4 years ago, they had a batch of bad clutches that were failing prematurely. Had never heard of clutchless shifting until I overheard Chris Wilcox mention that his clutch had gone away during qualifying and that he'd finished the session shifting clutchless. This was news to me.
Qualified P2 (sportsman) and slotted in behind P1 with P3 on my gear box after the start. We stayed that way for the first two laps and on the 3rd pass into the hairpin the clutch, that had become reluctant on lap 2, gave up the ghost completely. Figured there was no time like the present to try the Chris Wilcox clutchless shifting method and began snicking down and up through the gears without the clutch while holding onto P2. Discovered that less was more in terms of lever pressure and throttle to get the engine and drivetrain to match up. It wasn't pretty or smooth at the beginning and we lost some ground to P1 but after a couple of laps I got the hang of things and by the last lap was almost caught back up to P1. Gained a lot of ground through turn 1 and was no longer grateful for just holding onto P2... The red mist smell of victory was now filling my helmet.
Turn 3 took a couple of extra fervent tries to get the downshift done and P1 was pulling away. The sequence into the carousel was to breathe the throttle and then turn in but my over-focus on P1 allowed me to lose my mind and turn in first and then lift... Inducing a perfect Mr. Bill "OOOOOOHHHHHHHH NNNNNOOOOOOOO" TTO spin. With no clutch the motor stalled and I couldn't refire it. We'd gapped the field by at least 20 seconds so I sat there with enough time to smoke a cigarette before the rest of the field passed by.
It was a disappointing ending but a great race because I learned to clutchless shift by managing throttle and shift lever pressure with the sequential box. It does make you acutely aware of the relationship between engine and drivetrain speed as they really don't like to work together at wildly differing speeds.
In this case the failure wasn't my fault but I've always found that if you're nice to your clutch, your clutch will be nice to you.
