my situation:

ill be driving a 98 nissan frontier for awhile, after my suburban is sold. its a 5MT, and its not got a tach, yet. whats the basic way to launch

There are a couple simple concepts that will allow you to quickly figure out how to launch it.

All things being equal you want to launch a manual transmission car at the torque peak or as close to the torque peak as you can without lighting up the tires.

First figure out your torque peak location. Without a tach you will have to do it by ear, so go to a isolated road and in second gear find the rpm (ie speed on the speedometer) that you feel the strongest acceleration. Drive a bit at that speed so you're ear gets a lock on the engine sound at that speed.

To launch rev the engine to an rpm just above your torque peak and let the chutch out as quickly as you can with out pulling the engine speed down much. If when you do that it smokes the tires, drop the engine speed and try again.

If your having trouble with traction you want to launch at an rpm below the torque peak and then let the engine pull up into the max torque rpm once you get rolling.

If you have plenty of traction, you want to launch at an rpm just above the torque peak and let the load pull the engine down into the torque peak rpm.


By the way give the clutch plenty of rest time while working this out so you don't cook it!!!
Larry

What?

rev it till the valves float and dump the clutch

Oh wait that was my old camaro

thanks! :)