QOTD: Learning How to Drive

Watching NASCAR's race at Atlanta last night, I started thinking about how the manual transmissions on the next-gen cars are sequential and that the drivers don't need to use the clutch pedal to shift. This led me down a mental rabbit hole to my youth and the first manual-transmission vehicles I remember driving -- farm tractors.

Bear with me -- I am going somewhere with this, I promise.

When I was a lad, I had the chance to drive some of the tractors my uncle and grandfather used for farming. These were modern tractors with cabs, not the old-school antiques (though I drove one or two of those, too), and I tooled around at slow speeds in empty, harvested corn fields during downtime. The adults did all the real work, of course.

One thing about these tractors is that you used the clutch only when launching from a dead stop. You didn't need it to upshift or downshift. You used a hand throttle to gain speed, and when you ran up against the speed limit imposed by gear ratios, you just bumped it up a speed -- I think these manuals had 18 speeds.

It was an easy way to learn to drive -- I really just had to set a steady throttle and steer, and there was nothing to hit. I didn't even need brakes, the speeds were so slow you could just throttle down, and if you really needed to, you could engine brake via downshifting. All you had to do was not tip the damn thing by turning too sharply.

It was certainly easier to learn how to shift than on a car with a manual trans.

So, I ask of you, how did you learn to drive, and if that learning involved a stick shift, how do you learn how to drive a manual? On that latter question, I learned how to drive a manual-transmission car by letting the clutch out slowly and letting the car creep.

Your turn. Sound off below.

[Image: l i g h t p o e t/Shutterstock.com]

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