Feet smart: NASCAR drivers weigh the benefits of Shane van Gisbergen's heel-toe magic

INDIANAPOLIS – It’s the auto racing foot fetish that still makes Shane van Gisbergen chuckle.

During a stunning victory at the Chicago Street Race in his Cup Series debut July 2, van Gisbergen employed a lost art of stock car racing while to school NASCAR’s biggest stars.

While the three-time Supercars champion’s extensive background on street circuits Down Under helped him outpace the field by nearly a second per lap, the New Zealand native’s technique also was a source of wonder.

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Captured by a camera that once was common when Cup stars such as Ricky Rudd, Bill Elliott and Rusty Wallace worked road-course magic with their feet, van Gisbergen used a craft that is known as “heel-toe” – using his right foot to control the accelerator and brake while relying on his left for shifting.

The practice is unheard of in NASCAR, where drivers predominantly have used their left foot to brake for the past three decades since the introduction of transmissions that eliminated the need for the clutch while changing gears.

So what’s SVG’s secret to heel-toe?

“I don’t know what’s to tell,” van Gisbergen told NBC Sports’ Leigh Diffey with a laugh during an interview last week. “It’s normal to me. I always right-foot brake and heel-toe. It’s what I’ve grown up doing. I only started left-foot braking last year in a rally car.

“So yeah, to me it’s normal. But I guess they don’t do it here anymore. I know they used to in the old car, maybe. Yeah, I don’t get it. I don’t get what the infatuation with my feet is. But I’ll be doing it again this weekend.”

He won’t be the only driver using heel-toe to navigate the 14-turn, 2.439-mile road course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway today. Supercars points leader Brodie Kostecki will be braking with his right foot – just as virtually any Australian or Kiwi who wants to be successful in the series

“Pretty much 90 percent of everyone back home in Australia right-foot brakes,” Kostecki said. “It’s something we have to do back home with our cars. It’s sort of been the fastest way we get our Supercars around, so if you don’t do it back home, you don’t really make it.

“It’s quite amazing. Each sport is different in their own way. It was pretty cool to see the onboard (camera) of Shane; that’s something we don’t see much of back home.”

Kostecki was unsure of whether it would “help or hinder him” on the IMS road course (which is much smoother and wider than the bumpy, narrow confines of Chicago), but qualifying indicated the Supercars stars will do just fine. Kostecki qualified 11^th (but will start from the rear in a backup after smacking the wall), and van Gisbergen will start eighth.

If they excel today at Indy, it might prompt some Cup drivers to consider relearning how to tackle road and street courses in the future – a conversation that van Gisbergen already had sparked when he became the first driver to win his Cup debut in more than 60 years.

“There are a bunch of race engineers and drivers sitting around talking about this and asking ‘How can we can figure this out?’ ” NASCAR on NBC analyst Jeff Burton said on the NASCAR on NBC Podcast last month.

Therein lies the problem. Most Cup drivers don’t know the heel-toe technique, and those who have learned the concept aren’t comfortable with risking an unfamiliar technique during a race with so much at stake.

And with practice time restricted to an hour or less every weekend, and open testing essentially banned, there isn’t opportunity or time to learn.

“How the hell you going to do it?” Burton asks. “This is the problem with limited track time. There’s not as much time to develop a driving skill. There are engineers saying you’ve got to find a way to do this, but you’re going to use clutch under braking for the first time during a 20-minute practice?

“You and your team have to be willing to say if this doesn’t work, we might finish dead last in the tire barrier. You have to operate on the edge of grip and the car’s capabilities. It’s risky to do on a race weekend.”

Christopher Bell, whose background primarily was in dirt racing before moving to pavement several years ago, admits with a smile that “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s definitely something that would take a long time to master and probably be an easy way to make a mistake.”

Ryan Blaney has practiced the heel-toe in racing school cars with transmissions that necessitate shifting, and his teammate Scott McLaughlin (a three-time Supercars champion before moving to IndyCar three years ago) has advocated using it.

But Blaney estimates he would need years to match his current pace as a left-foot braker because “how often do you get to practice it? You don’t get to spend two days running a Cup car at a place, and it’s just different on the simulator.

“Maybe I should start. It’s something everyone has thought about after watching (van Gisbergen) do his thing, but it would be just a whole different learning experience. If I had the time, I would definitely love to do it. If I could go run a Cup car every single day, that’s all I would work on.”

The advantage of using the clutch while under braking is that it allows the car to “free roll” without the engine braking that occurs while downshifting.

“The RPMs go up, and those forces are delivered to the rear tires,” Burton said. “That creates force that slows the car down but misbalances the car. So by driving using the clutch, it prevents that engine braking from happening. It can make the car turn and rotate on a road course.”

While it might not be as effective in the smoother braking zones of the IMS road course, Blaney said “it still helps for sure. It’s an advantage if you can do it properly.”

After van Gisbergen’s win, Max Papis posted on social media that the heel-toe was the key for many road-racing experts who have excelled in stock cars. But it also was the preferred method for NASCAR regulars until about 30 years ago.

Burton said he learned heel-toe before his rookie Cup season in 1994, but he never needed it because of the new transmissions that arrived around the same time and no longer required the clutch for shifting.

Kevin Harvick, who has been racing in Cup since 2000, also was taught heel-toe but never used it – though he could see why it worked for two-time Supercars champion Marcos Ambrose, who won twice in Cup at Watkins Glen International in 2011-12.

“Those guys can modulate the brake with the clutch and be able to just do so much more in the braking zone,” Harvick said. “Marcos Ambrose was the last one who was that good at it. I think when you look at Shane, if Marcos Ambrose would have been in the type of car that he’s driving, he would have shined. He shined pretty bright on the road courses, but he would have been a much brighter star if he would have had the equipment to drive what Shane has.

“Both seem very similar in their skill levels and success in the things they’ve done. It’s fun to watch, especially when it’s not something that I’ve ever been a part of, to have a really concentrated road racing background. Mine has always been on the ovals. But it’s an art. They’re good at it.”

In his final Cup season, Harvick, 47, said it’s too late to learn heel-toe (“That’d be like me trying to go race IndyCar. That’s just something you need to do for years to be good at.”), but younger drivers seem intrigued.

Tyler Reddick said right-foot braking might have prevented him from crashing during the Chicago race but “I wasn’t going to pick it up in 12 hours.” The 23XI Racing driver, whose victory at Circuit of the Americas was his third on a road course since last year, said heel-toe is “definitely (something) I’ll try to play around with, but it’s not something that I’m good at by any means. I’ve never heel-to-toe braked in my life. I’m really bad at it, but I think there is always going to be certain conditions that will allow that to be an advantage potentially, having that extra little bit of control.”

Kyle Busch said he tried to work on his heel-toe technique in a production model Camaro during a recent Chevrolet-organized session at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. The two-time Cup champion was a half-second slower than when using his left-foot braking.

“I know how to do it and I can do it, but it’s very clunky,” Busch said. “I am not a smooth operator when it comes to having to do the heel-toe. I did it years ago when I first kind of came in (and) was learning from Boris Said, Ron Fellows and a couple of those guys. To me, every time I’m able to just maximize my left foot for brake, I’m way better off, so I’ve kind of gotten away from it.”

Cup rookie Ty Gibbs, who won Saturday’s Xfinity race on the IMS road course, said he knows heel-toe but isn’t sure if he would try it in a race.

“For sure, something I’ve looked at,” he said. “It’s a little bit different in these cars. But I think it’s definitely a different style and different technique that there’s always pros to learning different techniques. We have a lot of important races coming up, so I don’t know about hurting myself in one of them trying to practice it. So I think that’s something you do in the offseason.”