Do you know when is the best time to shift from one gear to the next?

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"The Best Time to Shift for Maximum Acceleration"


Yes, a few hundred RPM before redline.

 

Okay I am little confused I grew up being told that each gear has its on sweet spot. I noticed that in first gear my car does not go any first faster past 4k rpm. Driving it to redline really does not do anything but make a lot of unnecessary noise. So have I been doing it wrong all these years or this DOC-TUBE-MENTARY a little off.

 

It's about setting up the car for the next gear.
If you have a car making peak power at 6000 and you shift at 4000, you're not getting the most out of that first gear, and you're setting up the car for the next gear with an rpm that's too low for that gear and therefore it will accelerate slower

 

When seat of the pants feeling tells you the acceleration has started to flatten out you grab the next gear.

 

Before she blows

 

wait ....what?

 

I've seen the Engineering Explained video presented a different way using horsepower and it was explained nearly the same but defined shifting for acceleration as a power addition game where each shift should be made to minimize the loss of horsepower at the beginning of the rev range for that gear and topping out adds a bit of horsepower each time (as best I remember anyways - I was looking into best shift points and had a neat spread sheet for it back in the 90's several HD wipes, operating systems and computers ago - the spread sheet presented it a different way as "road force").

I suspect for most applications shifting at the redline is no happy coincidence, especially in a performance car and you can easily test this by going to the track and shifting at various points using your time slip as a guide rather than the butt dyno.