As that article says, with that kind of performance you’re limited not by the engine but by the speed with which a human can change gears with a manual gearbox. Half a second to change gear is forever when you’re going 0-60 in under three seconds.
You know what? I don’t care about that half a second. Let me drive the damn car.
F1’s haven’t had a mechanical shifter, in what, over two decades?
Shifting is done from the steering wheel. Human limbs are just too slow. Okay, so you get a “gear shift”. But you call this driving? Where’s my riding mechanician? Who’s going to adjust the choke, engine timing, watch for cars behind me, pump the fuel and fix the magneto when it breaks down?
You can keep your propeller-head fuel injection too. Racing just wasn’t the same after ‘Jigger’ Johnson retired.
Amen. There are two schools of thought of sports car consumers:
1. Buy a car you will never have the ability to drive at the top end of it’s capability outside of access to a high speed track and top end competitive driving thereon, but that really impresses girls and excites your inner teenager.
2. Buy a car that is just beyond your driving ability that you can grow into on the streets and achieve the satisfaction of mastering while experiencing the enjoyment of a responsive street competent machine.
I suspect the automatic transmission is mostly about protecting the drive train. Time will tell whether they have solved the puzzle of cooling a mid-engine.
I believe only Porsche still offer manual gearboxes in cars with that kind of performance, and only because a majority of buyers wanted them (and presumably because they had an existing gearbox that would fit)
For the Corvette, it’s performance, lack of interest from buyers, and lack of an existing gearbox that can do the job. They had to build the DCT specially for the car, and didn’t want to build a manual for the small percentage of buyers who buy one.
I too prefer manual transmissions for sports cars, so I agree with Rand on this one.
However, speaking of manual transmissions, one of those might have been an improvement over the Boeing Starliner’s GNC systems today. 🙂
I don’t really see the problem. This isn’t an automatic in the common sense of the word. There is no torque converter slush box and the gear is not selected by hardware outside of the driver’s direct control. The driver still chooses the gear. Instead of yanking on a mechanical linkage now we use an electro-mechanical link.
It just doesn’t seem the same without a pedal clutch.
True. The clutch was probably the slowest part of the shift though.
No question that the limiting factor in acceleration of a manual gearbox is the clutch management of the driver. Our point is that we’re willing to sacrifice some neck snappage for retention of the original experience of driving a muscle or sports car.
Plus, it provides some insurance against theft, since so few kids even know how to drive a stick these days.
Apparently one of the reasons Lamborghini doesn’t offer a manual transmission in their new cars is because you’d need 70kg of force to disengage the clutch. That would mean they’d need to add some kind of power assist anyway, so it’s easier just to get rid of the pedal.
“kg force”? Sheesh. People keep complaining about english units and then that comes up.
Call it a “sports” car if you like. But the clutch and shift and throttle blipping by foot rocking is going to get smoked on the track when up against those paddle switches. Not to mention the precise force balancing needed between engine and transmission needed by the modern road rockets. Life moves on. What you want is the experience of driving a vintage racer. And that’s okay too.
As that article says, with that kind of performance you’re limited not by the engine but by the speed with which a human can change gears with a manual gearbox. Half a second to change gear is forever when you’re going 0-60 in under three seconds.
You know what? I don’t care about that half a second. Let me drive the damn car.
F1’s haven’t had a mechanical shifter, in what, over two decades?
Shifting is done from the steering wheel. Human limbs are just too slow. Okay, so you get a “gear shift”. But you call this driving? Where’s my riding mechanician? Who’s going to adjust the choke, engine timing, watch for cars behind me, pump the fuel and fix the magneto when it breaks down?
You can keep your propeller-head fuel injection too. Racing just wasn’t the same after ‘Jigger’ Johnson retired.
Amen. There are two schools of thought of sports car consumers:
1. Buy a car you will never have the ability to drive at the top end of it’s capability outside of access to a high speed track and top end competitive driving thereon, but that really impresses girls and excites your inner teenager.
2. Buy a car that is just beyond your driving ability that you can grow into on the streets and achieve the satisfaction of mastering while experiencing the enjoyment of a responsive street competent machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLs_RPtcuw
I suspect the automatic transmission is mostly about protecting the drive train. Time will tell whether they have solved the puzzle of cooling a mid-engine.
I believe only Porsche still offer manual gearboxes in cars with that kind of performance, and only because a majority of buyers wanted them (and presumably because they had an existing gearbox that would fit)
For the Corvette, it’s performance, lack of interest from buyers, and lack of an existing gearbox that can do the job. They had to build the DCT specially for the car, and didn’t want to build a manual for the small percentage of buyers who buy one.
I too prefer manual transmissions for sports cars, so I agree with Rand on this one.
However, speaking of manual transmissions, one of those might have been an improvement over the Boeing Starliner’s GNC systems today. 🙂
I don’t really see the problem. This isn’t an automatic in the common sense of the word. There is no torque converter slush box and the gear is not selected by hardware outside of the driver’s direct control. The driver still chooses the gear. Instead of yanking on a mechanical linkage now we use an electro-mechanical link.
It just doesn’t seem the same without a pedal clutch.
True. The clutch was probably the slowest part of the shift though.
No question that the limiting factor in acceleration of a manual gearbox is the clutch management of the driver. Our point is that we’re willing to sacrifice some neck snappage for retention of the original experience of driving a muscle or sports car.
Plus, it provides some insurance against theft, since so few kids even know how to drive a stick these days.
Apparently one of the reasons Lamborghini doesn’t offer a manual transmission in their new cars is because you’d need 70kg of force to disengage the clutch. That would mean they’d need to add some kind of power assist anyway, so it’s easier just to get rid of the pedal.
“kg force”? Sheesh. People keep complaining about english units and then that comes up.
Call it a “sports” car if you like. But the clutch and shift and throttle blipping by foot rocking is going to get smoked on the track when up against those paddle switches. Not to mention the precise force balancing needed between engine and transmission needed by the modern road rockets. Life moves on. What you want is the experience of driving a vintage racer. And that’s okay too.