I’ve been a bit quiet lately, and I wanted to pop in and catch up. I suffered a pretty significant injury four weeks before the season opener at Nashville Superspeedway. This led me on an engineering journey to set up the Thunder Roadster so it could be driven without my left foot. Something that has worked to mixed results but, more importantly, kept me in the racecar despite the injury.
I Tore My Left Calf
In what I am calling my first official ‘getting older’ injury, I tore my left calf stepping off my front porch. In a motion I have performed tens of thousands of times, my calf suddenly decided to engage in non-calf-like activities and did not fire when I stepped down. This was not a suddenly painful injury, though. It felt like a rope pulled inside the muscle tissue. Almost electrical too.
More than one racer has recommended I work on that story, but it is what it is.
The result was an immediate loss of mobility in my lower left leg that, within an hour, reduced my foot’s range of motion to 10 percent. I was officially unable to walk. There is a walk-in orthopedic clinic in Huntsville, and I was able to get diagnosed with a grade 2 strain (aka tear) and put in a walking boot for a 6 to 10 week recovery.
But here is something I find quite fascinating about the human body. In this type of injury, the brain creates a neuroligcal splint and prevents the muscle from firing altogether. This was a very disconcerting feeling. Throughout recovery, I couldn’t even attempt to walk or push through the injury, even if I tried. And the calf wouldn’t start to wake up until the full 6-week mark.
With the season opener 4 weeks away … what to do?
Website Redesign
Well, officially unable to walk unassisted for the second time in a few years, the first thing I did was reskin the website. I am still drawn to minimalist design, and while the lack of easy navigation and the single-scroll nature of the old site had their place, in my mind, it’s time to move on.
So I recategorized everything into navigation tags with a more intuitive scheme. It’s amazing how much data you accumulate over the life of a blog, and this turned out to be a surprising amount of work. The result isn’t perfect, but it is 90 percent what I had in mind and, more importantly, way more navigable now. And the new design opens up the door for a few more expansions I have in mind as well, without being bogged down in maintenance tasks.
Figure Out How to Drive the Thunder Roadster Without the Left Foot
After the redesign, this became priority 1. If I can overcome this limitation, I can race. And it just so happens that the Thunder Roadster is equipped with a sequential motorcycle gearbox and doesn’t necessarily require clutch shifting. However, it is also a 1990’s engine, and unlike modern motorcycle sequentials, it is a bit more finicky. Especially on downshifts.
So that was the plan. Adapt the car or the driver to eliminate the foot clutch altogether. On upshifts, this is simple. You simply load the gear and breathe off the throttle, and the gear ‘snicks’ up.
Downshifts, however, require abrupt load interruption through the clutch or a throttle blip. Leading me down two paths. One that failed and one that worked 99 percent of the time. First, I built a hand clutch system for the car and mounted the new master cylinder to the shifter. This came close to working, but the hand lever was a few mm short on stroke and would not fully overcome the clutch spring.
I would like to thank some bad internet and AI advice on specing the ‘right ‘ parts that turned out to be wrong. Although I do believe a functional hand clutch is possible, just not in the timeframe I had left.
Which left me with option two. Modify the gas pedal so I can blip the throttle on downshifts and interrupt the load on the transmission. This method got me to the racetrack, unable to walk normally but ready to race. Speaking of which …
Getting to the Track
This is a side note, but I practiced plenty of muscle-confusion exercises while driving my tow vehicle and its manual transmission with only one functional leg. But I persevered and adapted quickly, using my right foot to activate the clutch and immediately get it back over to the throttle. Being a diesel, it begins rolling with no throttle input. Using one foot just makes the gear shifts take about 3x longer. I would also keep my cane handy if I ever needed to hold the brake on a hill while working the clutch. It was confusing and stressful, and fortunately, a higher power was looking out for me, and I didn’t see any traffic on my trip to Nashville.
2026 Season Opener at Nashville Superspeedway
Here we are at Nashville Superspeedway, driving the Thunder Roadster with only one foot in Super Touring 4. I adapted quickly and won the class in all three races while finishing second overall in the Aussie pursuit.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. When I first bought the Roadster, I was told to always use the clutch. And while I don’t think that was bad advice, nor do I think the previous owner was ill-informed, it’s also not the complete story. I will dig into it in a separate post. But simply breathing the throttle to upshift was probably worth a half second over clutched upshifts.
The downshifts, however, would work until they wouldn’t. The heel-toe had a very narrow timing window, and timing could get wonky going from 5th to 2nd in turn 2. Something that probably cost me a bit of time.
I also couldn’t left-foot brake during this event, so I was super happy to see lap times on par and even a bit quicker than last year. On a side note, the data suggests that once combined, clutchless upshifts and left-foot transition braking will be much faster. And as I would discover at NOLA a few weeks later, with a more stable left leg, the car prefers a clutch plus heel-toe blip on downshifts.
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NOLA Motorsports Park (Event 2)
I would ultimately skip event 2 at NCM and go straight to NOLA this year. Mainly because I felt that when the downshifts acted up, they could be damaging the transmission gears. And the last thing I want is an involved sequential rebuild with everything going on right now. That and NCM would be inconsequential to overall points this season.
At NOLA, I would start reengaging my left foot in the driving process. That is where I discovered the car really likes the clutch application and blip on downshifts. It yields a lot less drivetrain shock. I was also happy to start left-foot braking again on the technical stuff, as NOLA is a very rough, bouncy track. Unsettling the Thunder Roadster easily at the limit in high-commitment turns.
Just thinking out loud, now that I am regaining confidence in my left foot, I want to try a third technique on the roadster. That is, all braking with the left foot and using the right foot to blip the throttle on downshifts. This will eliminate the imprecise heel-toe and give me much finer blip control. Hopefully, yielding a smooth, consistent, and clutchless-shifting drivetrain that will save serious lap time.
The racing was uneventful. Although I felt like I drove my ass off, the lap times didn’t reflect that. The Hayabusa-powered cars were lapping between 1.54 and 1.58, and the closest I could get was a 2.02 in the Yamaha car. I really felt the car had a 1.59, but again, NOLA is a very rough track, and I can see in the videos that I am keeping a higher safety margin on two of the commitment turns than I usually do. Probably to be expected coming off an injury and ‘feeling’ things out.
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Next…
The season is a little spread this year, and I won’t be back behind the wheel of the roadster until the end of June. So in the meantime, I am giving the Thunder Roadster a ‘final’ pass to optimize it for what it is with the Yamaha motor, all without a huge budget. Then I’m dusting off the Super Touring Miata into something new, and trying my hand at Rallycross in Hollytree, AL, with the Tennessee Valley Region SCCA as well.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, NOLA Drift (NODrft) was at the track while we were racing. Of course, I had to check it out, slapped on my Driftopia hat, and hopped into a beautiful S13 for some ride-alongs. This region has some very talented drivers, and it is always a pleasure to revisit my drifter roots.
