Can't really comment on the topic as such, but here's a true story of something that happened to me, which is kind of on the same lines.
About ten years ago i had to take the car in for a service. So i dropped it into the garage on the way to work. Unfortunately the only courtesy car they had was an automatic.
I'd never driven an auto before and had always thought they were a bit gay to be honest, but i was late for work, so i took it.
The garage was beside a really busy roundabout over a motorway, and it was at rush hour. So i'm sat there waiting for a gap in the traffic 1min/2min/3min, getting really cheesed off, and getting really late for work now, then i see a gap, not a big one, but it's a gap. I floor the throttle and the car launches forward, so far so good, then, muscle memory kicks in and i try to change gear
.
Thing was, my clio had a really stiff clutch so i was used to a quite a bit of resistance, so with a firm push i pressed what i thought was the clutch pedal (it had almost the same amount of pressure as my clutch) and moved the stick into 2nd gear !
Yeah right.....more like brake pedal to the floor in a stream of fast flowing rush hour traffic.
So after coming to a screeching halt i floored the throttle, and thats when i found out i'd actually moved the stick into park
Thankfully the sound of the engine bouncing off the rev limiter drowned out the car horns and naughty words being hurled at me from my fellow motorists.
How the hell no-one slammed into the back of me i'll never know.