Sometimes you watch people hustling through road-oriented gearboxes, and you have to wonder how they don’t explode. Tom Goh, editor at Zerotohundred, zips through this Civic Type-R’s six-speed and shows us how to time shifts to perfection without looking to break a sweat.
Preparing every shift with an anticipatory rest of his left foot on the clutch pedal, Goh synchronizes all three elements seamlessly as he moves up the gearbox. A flash of black shoes and red Nomex gloves, Goh flicks through his gearbox at incredible speed without beating his synchros. He only botches it once, and the rest of the time he’s constantly keeping the car in its ideal rev range—he might as well have a sequential box. It’s an enviable level of skill he displays here, but it’s not just Fast and Furious-style shifting that makes him an ace. Nothing remotely grannyish about his shifts.
He manages the Type R and its shortcomings well, too. Instead of carrying an excessive amount of speed into Sepang’s quick corners, he takes a conservative entry speed, adds an aggressive dab of steering lock to capitalize on the short wheelbase and rotate the car into the corner. Getting into the apex is always clean, but sometimes applying the throttle on the way out ends in a widened line. When Goh mats the throttle at the apex, the front differential puts the power down smoothly and without any hiccups; taking full advantage of that engine sitting over the driven wheels to exit cleanly.