[Russell Sobie]

That's what I'm trying to achieve by downshifting while braking, right? Downshifting puts me into higher revs which then allows for harder breaking. The problem here is that I seem to always be clicking downshift a millisecond (or 10) early, and instead of the transmission screaming about it but doing it anyway, it simply disallows it entirely. Then the time it takes for me to register that what I did did nothing, I'm WELL late on downshifting again now that I'm certainly at low enough revs.

I guess if I were going to program a gearbox to have downshift protection, I would queue up inputs that come when downshift protection would be engaged, and if after less than a second the RPMs were low enough for a safe downshift, I would immediately trigger the downshift. If instead I did not detect the RPMs going low enough in a short enough time span, I would then ignore the input.

Video games do this sort of thing all the time for button inputs... cars makers haven't figured this out?

It's looking like I just need to retrain my brain to make sure I'm just a teeny bit lower RPM before trying to downshift.