Where do you rest your left foot?

[transalpian]

My birkin is left hand drive. I have the pedals all the way forward and the seat all the way back. My legs are very comfortable, unless I'm driving on the freeway. When I'm just droning along, I don't know where to rest my foot!

 

I can get my foot onto the floor, below the clutch pedal. But its a bit too snug for an easy transition to the pedal, in a panic stop for example.

 

I find myself hovering my foot over the clutch which is tiring.

 

What do you all do?

 

I'm imagining a small angle bracket, secured to the sidewall with adhesive. Just enough to catch the edge of my shoe, but not so large to cause interference.

 

Thoughts?

[slomove]

I have a Birkin, too and for highway driving I do have the left foot under the clutch. Shoe size 11 and with driving shoes I can navigate around the pedals just fine. I mean, in the worst case if the left foot should get stuck while braking, well I would just have to stall the engine but that has never happened.

 

Driving with sneakers or other wide shoes (which I do occasionally) is a different story. That requires some practice and well choreographed synchronization of clutch and brake so that the feet don't block each other.

[pi7ot]

Birkin.

I slip my left foot under the clutch pedal and rest it against the upright brace located against the skin.

 

m

[twobone]

I have the same problem. Slipping it under the clutch doesn't work that well for me on my caterham.

 

I find I just have to have it hover over the clutch pedal

[scannon]

I'm quite comfortable with my left foot under the clutch once I am in 5th gear and up to speed. I have installed cruise control so I can take my right foot off the throttle and move it back a bit and rest my knee against the transmission tunnel. That makes for very comfortable long distance cruising.

[HOTTTCAR]

According to my "daddy" this is not the correct way to create a dead peddle but it works perfectly.

Increase the clutch master cylinder to a I inch diameter piston and install a stop behind the pedal to prevent over extension of the slave cylinder. This makes the clutch hard enough to engage that you can now rest your foot on it without damaging the clutch. My wife thinks the clutch is too hard to engage so does not like to drive the car.......sooo... she doesn't. That is probably a good thing.

Gale

Edited October 12, 2013 by HOTTTCAR

[slngsht]

When I had a running seven, I put my foot behind the clutch.

[JohnK]

When I was redesigning everything in my footwell I found I could put a small tab above, to the left and a bit rearward of my clutch pedal that I could catch with the toe of my shoe. Since I was fabricating everything else in the area, doing a rest was relatively easy, 'cept for the time spent figuring out where the dickens I could position the tab so that it would NEVER be in the way if I was in a hurry to do something with the pedals, but still allow me to actually rest my left foot on it when cruising. It turned out to be worth the effort (and I seem to have gotten quite used to being able to do reasonably solid welds while cramped up into one weird position or the other :-) ).

 

A note on room for your feet: Kitcat in first introduction to my car said that the footwell in my S2k was really cramped compared to his his std Caterham ( keep forgetting the type but it's NOT the one with the roomier chassis). So I guess you can find space for such things if you really work at it. Now a real dead pedal is another matter entirely.

[bsimon]

I turn my left foot sideways with my heel locked against the heel of my right foot. I raise my left knee slightly and rest against the gearbox tunnel. There's enough room in an S3 to handle my size 11-1/2 in this fashion. My foot is not behind the clutch pedal, just slightly under, it ready to make a sudden move if needed.

 

I've never tried this in a LHD car. The instrument panel gusset plate may not let you do this without wracking your knee.

[JohnCh]

Bob, reading your description, I was having visions of a game of Twister gone horribly wrong...but then I came to the part about your car being RHD. Now it makes sense

 

Like others here, I keep my left foot behind the clutch pedal, although with the interior panels removed, the Westfield has just enough room that I can slip my foot between the pedal and the outer aluminum skin, rather than slide it underneath. Given my left knee is shot, that makes driving a lot more comfortable.

 

-John

[BirkinBernie]

I have size 12 narrow feet, and am able to slip my foot in front of the clutch on my Birkin. Are you aware of how the pedal pads are attached to the arms? You can easily move the pads to multiple positions, both up and down and to the left or right of the pedal arm. In fact, to gain some room, I just removed the clutch pedal pad. If you unbolt the pedal assembly, you can lift it out of the footwell and get easy access to the pedals. The pic of this is Mitch Leben's car, where some extensions were added to get the pedals closer.

 

HTH,

Bernie

[dhubbard422]

I have a Superformance S-1 and wear size 13 shoes in medium to wide. When I recently picked up my 7 (which I purchased sight unseen...) I found that I could drive it with minimalist shoes, as others on this list had told me I could, but that it was really, really hard to get my left foot behind the clutch pedal. I could not simply move my left foot under the pedal, but if I was careful I could slip it between the clutch and brake - if everything was at just the right angle... I practiced this maneuver until it was reasonably repeatable. However, long stints in traffic with my left foot up above the pedal were agony; the seat position is not adjustable in the S-1, but the pedal box is and mine is all the way back into the footbox, yet I still do not have enough space to have my clutch foot above the pedal as my knee is uncomfortably jammed up under the dash.

 

Anyway, after my 3.5 day, 1,600 mile trip to get the car home... I found that I could easily slip my foot underneath the clutch pedal when barefoot! So, I went searching for shorter, even more minimalist shoes. I found a pair of water shoes that allow me to slip my clutch foot under the pedal fairly easily. My 7 may even encourage me to try a pair of "fivefingers" as they may be the most form fitting shoes I can find.

 

So, can you slip your foot under the clutch pedal when barefoot? If yes, maybe a different pair shoes will fix the problem. Else, maybe you can easily modify the clutch pedal such that it hangs down less and makes it easier to get behind the pedal.

 

I still plan to see if it is possible to reduce the width of the clutch and brake pedals so that it is easier to slide my foot between the pedals and/or to decrease the height of the clutch pedal pad such that it is easier to slip my left foot under the pedal.

 

The angle of the pedal at rest also effects the space between the bottom of the pedal and the floor. The pedal will transcribe an arc as it is pushed in and if it is near the bottom of that arc you may be able to adjust it so that the space between the pedal and the floor is greater by bring the pedal closer to you. Of course this will require you to adjust all of the pedals relative to each other and their fore-aft position in the footbox.

 

I've also wondered about adding a small tab to act as a dead pedal - it seems that a bigger tab would be more comfortable, but even a small one may help a bit. I'm curious if folks on this list have been successful in adding a small dead pedal/tab and if it helped.