Gran Turismo 3 - How To Do The Reverse Shift Trick

In GT3, for some unexplainable reason, there exists a little trick you can utilize to quicken your shift times & ultimately accelerate up to speed faster. It tends to work best with low powered cars with untuned and highly inefficient clutches & drivetrains. Cars with long pauses between shifts where the car stops accelerating. So this trick becomes most useful in the early game. It involves the reverse button as instead of shifting with the normal shift up button, you basically with this trick just shift with reverse. Right as you're about to hit the car's rev limiter, very quickly tap triangle or whatever you have the reverse button mapped to. This takes a bit of practice to get the hang of as it requires frame perfect inputs. But if you timed it right, the car will shift up without the long pause of waiting for the revs to drop down, improving acceleration a lot. The 1000 meter acceleration test at the Test Course is the perfect way to test & practice with this. This tends to be easiest to do on the NTSC-J (Japanese) version as it only runs 50 FPS while the NTSC-U and PAL versions run 60 FPS. Speedrunners use this trick all the time as it makes your car seem faster than it really is, making certain early game events much easier to complete, especially with the license tests, so it's absolutely worth learning.

[@thewitchyuria]

bruh this video was uploaded 1 day ago i thought it was from 12 years ago

[@TeaKanji]

Glad to see reverse shifting getting more exposure, it completely changed the game for me when I got the hang of it.
Just to add to your description, it works best for cars with power bands at high-RPM's, due to the RPM needle slowly gliding down. With regular shifting, the Miata drops out of the power band and has to slowly accelerate back up, while with reverse shifting, it spends more time in the 6000 - 8000 RPM range. All cars with no drivetrain upgrades will benefit from frame-perfect reverse shifts, but peaky high-RPM cars like the Integra Type R get a massive boost from it. It's less to do with how much power the car has, and more to do with the RPM range where it produces it.
As for why it happens, it's because pressing reverse puts the car into neutral gear, and letting go causes the car to gear up or down depending on the car's RPM. If you reverse shift too early, the car will stay in the gear it was already in. It depends on the car; for Subaru Impreza's for example, the game lets you do it slightly before redline, as its power band is at mid-RPM's. You want to spend as little time as possible in neutral gear because it stalls the car's acceleration, hence why optimal reverse shifts are frame-perfect.
Reverse shifting also exists in GT Concept and GT4 Prologue, but it was patched in GT4. You can, however, use handbrake to enter neutral gear, and if you immediately gear up, the RPM needle will glide down the same way. It's extremely precise though, and rarely faster than regular shifting as pressing handbrake slows the car down. It also doesn't work for FF's as their handbrakes work differently. GT TRDS has some good videos demonstrating both GT3 reverse shifting and GT4 handbrake shifting on their channel.

[@Zanarkand_0]

Holy shit. I never knew about this. This is great, thank you!

[@Impulse1226]

This’ll be useful for license tests, thankssss

[@RyuusanFT86]

You ever just momey shift to accelerate faster?

[@OversteerAllDay]

Yup who doesn’t

[@TheTrooperMB]

Smoking the clutch in gt3 :O

[@gmdgamingdoost3695]

You also can do it in gt4 I think. You just have to tap the handbrake button instead.

[@FormulaOneFan98]

This makes getting gold on the first license very easy

[@darkmagicians62]

I'll try at the 2nd one (with Viper)

[@gxdyzzz3776]

how do you record ps2 games?

[@MrSmashboy28]

Elgato capture card

[@Johnwalter1044]

Does this glitch work in GT4?

[@MrSmashboy28]

Idk, I don’t even have GT4.