PLEASE don't downshift in the winter, lol. You will lock the tires up or just send yourself into a slide if there is ice. I live in the mountains in PA, really bad for snow and ice and if you slip up even one time downshifting thats it, as soon as your tires start sliding your going wherever it feels like taking you.

I always downshift and I have always been told to. I don't downshift and drop it into secound and hit 3500rpms, I just downshift when the gear I'm in hits about 1500 rpms and break a little before I go into the next gear down and let it out nice and easy. I have never had a problem with any of my cars(92' cavi, 72' chevy truck and 97' Mazda MX6) Along with any of my familys cars or trucks. Its all about how you do it, the reason I was tought to do it is when your going fairly fast(like 65mph) and you just push in the clutch and use your breaks your going to heat your rotors up real bad(maybe warp them) and wear your break pads down, so I use a mixture of the 2 things, seems to work pretty good.

 

[/quote] Spud's right, it's turbo timer. Your pic shows KHP as the primary speed reading with MPH as a secondary, but you're saying it's MPH? I thought Canadians had KHP speedo. I think you're confusing yourself, lol.

I do a form of what you do but I leave it in the gear that it's already in, i.e. 5th gear from the highway, then once I'm in my idle rpm, I throw it into neutral. I hardly downshift unless, I need to STOP within a shorter distance than normal and then I only downshift to the next lowest gear. Everyone was taught differently, I was taught to throw it into neutral, but I don't. Like I stated before, automatic cars don't downshift, they stay in the current gear and use the engine to brake that way while the driver is applying the brakes, that's how I do it.

 

snow and ice is reason i now have a neon. drive like granny if the temp gets close to freezing. i was doing 30mph and upshifted to 3rd and the tires broke. slid to the on-comming lane, got enough control not go into the 10 ft deep ditch on the left side. but, that pesky driver comming at me head-on (what WAS he thinking) convinced me to try and get back into my lane PDQ. missed the other car by about 1/2 mm (for some reason his eyes were real big) and went right into the 5 ft deep ditch on the right side of the road and removed a sign that didn't really need to be there anyway. moral of the story: snow and ice are the work of the DEVIL!!!

 

p3, was your car running when you took that pic? Is the oil light always on?

 

Naa that oild thingy is on only before engine starts runing after that no lights go on the dasboard at all.