>Amusing anecdote follows. Well, fairly amusing. Anyway, it's an
>anecdote......upon arrival in London for a tour of duty with the
>USAF I was eager to begin the driving experience. I paid particular
>attention to how the locals did things, but the one thing that had
>me puzzled for awhile was the noise that occurred every time I came
>to a stop at a traffic light or stop sign. Finally figured it out.
>Standard procedure in England is to apply the hand brake whenever
>stopped at traffic light/stop sign. The noise was the ratcheting
>sound from everybody else's handbrake! I quickly realized that with
>the majority of autos having manual transmissions, this was a good,
>common sense procedure and adopted it. From there it was an easy
>transition to properly starting from a stop on an incline with a
>manual transmission car, holding the car stationary as you slowly
>released the clutch, disengaging the hand brake just as the clutch
>began taking up the load. Watching people in this country take off
>from a red light, on a upgrade, in a manual still gets my goat as
>they roll backwards until the clutch engages.
Those us is with a sensitive disposition soften the 'ratcheting' by
partly holding in the button while pulling up the lever. My daughter
got a helluva rollicking on her first driving lesson for not doing
this - but it wasn't me but a pukka driving school!
PaulH
73 Roadster (HD&H)
75 V8 (DD)
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