5speed vs auto?

[Wang2k]

the fastest supras use air shifted chevy turbo 400 trannies with tons of mods.

Its hard to beat that consistency...but it sucks alot of power.

Also...the 1:1 third gear in a turbo 400 would suck on the street compared to a 6 speed with double or triple overdrive lol.

I think its a durability issue.

[ProRally Codriver]

Well, theoretically he's right. So long as a driver has about a week or so experience with a manual, he will beat an equally modded car on the drag strip.

Maybe I just take knowing how to drive a manual as a given. Unless the driver is a double or more amputee. In my book if you have all your apendanges and are at least 16 years old, you should at least know how to drive a stick.

I can even say I'm coordinated enough to drive right-hand drive manuals without grinding gears on my first time out without driving other motorists off the road. 1/2 way cross country in 24hours on race tires, AWD and high boosted turbo on bogus vehicle registration.

That depends. Most sub ten second cars opt to go auto, as it gets very hard to be anywhere near the efficiency of an auto shifter at that power level.

Better is custom electro/hydraulic sequential shifters.
Stuff like http://www.xtrac.com/mainindex.htm

The transmission we blew up 2 weekends ago (rallying) was $40K.

IF you don't have a good launhing texhnique you're toast to a similar car.

There isn't much to the technique. A weekend in a given car with given tires to familarize the extent of traction, powerband, clutch and gearchanges is all it takes.

you obviously can't dump the clutch high in the RPMS without losing a lot of traction.

Thats what launch control and limited slip differentials are for. Technology and $ go along way to overcome driver input in dragracing. I could be a little biased though cause all I've dragraced is AWD cars so traction has been less an issue in my experience.

If you have a turbo, sc, or nitrous car, different techniques apply across the board as well.

I disagree and only conceed that some turbo cars suffer from turbo lag and without having an anti-lag programed into ECU (dumps fuel into exhaust manifold by retarding valve timing where it is burnt, explodes and keeps turbo spooled up), the driver may have to learn how to manually keep the turbo spooled by feathering gas pedal.

Now I figure you like to rally, and I will say this, while all the things I said above are true, you can still be a halfway decent driver and hang not too far behind a great driver. But in rallying/auto-xing you HAVE to have skills, or you'll get smoked.

You figured correct. The driver is the single most variable factor contributed to speed in rally.

But to expand on your rallying/auto-xing thesis, the difference between them is rally driver also have to have HUGE balls to hang it out at top speed admist trees, cliffs and other car-crunching, bone-breaking immovable objects on roads they've never seen before with hundreds of different turns and jumps they only see once (usually) in an event usually lasting several days, where-as autoXers fear only that they may squish a 2 foot flimsy plastic cone ruining their time on a harmless parkinglot course with turns they've seen people negotiate all day in an event with winning times less than a minute and therefore, don't have the balls a rallydriver has.

I think the conflict here is drag racing and autocrossing come from two majorly different schools of thought, and due to the fact that the difference in driver ability will be WAY more evident on a road course than on the 1320, course drivers tend to pick apart drag drivers for simply going straight down a track.

Do you think maybe its because the fact is there is no braking, downshifting or turning the steering wheel except minor adjustments in dragracing?

I do.

All of this is why after I owned a 5spd, I cna't see myself ever driving an auto again, at least in the sake of a car, if I had an suv or truck (i.e. lightning) it would be different.

Agreed. I own (I don't know how many) cars and all are manual but my truck/SUV is auto just so I can hold my beer offroading without worrying about shifting. Plus the auto is better for towing.

So the answer to the original post is,.... get the manual for reliability if you are going to build the engine for power, get the manual for more fun and driving experience or......get the auto if you lack arms or legs or plan to use your Solara to tow your boat/racecar.

[NeFaRiOuS_SLE]

Well, theoretically he's right. So long as a driver has about a week or so experience with a manual, he will beat an equally modded car on the drag strip.

Maybe I just take knowing how to drive a manual as a given. Unless the driver is a double or more amputee. In my book if you have all your apendanges and are at least 16 years old, you should at least know how to drive a stick.

I can even say I'm coordinated enough to drive right-hand drive manuals without grinding gears on my first time out without driving other motorists off the road. 1/2 way cross country in 24hours on race tires, AWD and high boosted turbo on bogus vehicle registration.

Well, slushbox is a no-brainer and all Americans have it, including me when my dad pushed me into buying a car to replace my SenCrap (Lemon Law buyback) and there was only the SLE in red or silver (but it was $3,000 more due to lower mileage and TRAC. I wanted that one so bad), but that's another story when some European countries won't let you pass a driver's test without learning the way of the clutch.

With that being said, 80-something percent of people (just my estimate, I don't know the real figure) own a car with a slushbox, but not many own manual, the ones that do are either performance enthusiasts, doesn't want to pay the $1000+ extra to get slushbox, wants to save gas or some other reason. However, we live in a generation of spoiled brats: Now we got F1-grade clutchless fingertip shifters, slapsticks (on some custom cars) and more popularly, Tiptronic.

So with that in consideration, for you to say that driving manual is a given is an overstatement. I mean sure, I learned it the hard way and got it down in a '67 Bug with my friend's 4-speed, go-cart steering wheel and a not-very-big parking lot on-and-off for only 3 days (don't remember), but that doesn't mean you know how to do rally/race/powershift (not recommended) right off the bat either; the release times, clutching and shifting are quite different from normal traffic driving, and we all know some Southern Cali people that can't drive for shitttttt, even with slushbox, so it might take 2-3 weeks for them to learn.

And with the 16-year old thing in mind, great... If we follow the way of the Euros! Except when I was 6 and my dad drove an '88 B2000 pickup, my family drove slushbox from then on, and even in SoCal there are only 2 driving schools in a 20-mile radius from where I lived that offered manual training.