I was taken aback at the difficulty he had with clutch/throttle coordination. He’s a coordinated guy. All I can figure is that a decade of video game car shifting locked in his brain as THE way to drive a stick. He was OK after a while. Clutch plate survived.
I had to teach myself how to drive a stick.
When I was 18, I was left to take a friend’s car back to his house after he left for a trip, not realizing it was a stick until he had left and I was all by myself with the car.
Luckily, I had a quiet residential neighborhood to practice in. It took me about 10 minutes of trial and error to get it together, clutch and accelerator and shifter, and I never had a problem since, and that was 1973................