Quote:
Originally Posted by XutvJet
I've been driving since the late 1980s and have modified, drag raced (on a real strip), and auto-xed many of my cars. I've never destroyed a manual or auto. However, I've been around the car scene long enough to know manuals are tend to be far more fragile when it comes to hard driving/shifting and launching, especially on sticky rubber and grippy surfaces. It's just the nature of the design to extract the most performance (high rpm, lots of clutch slip and throttle modulation) and excessive drivetrain shock loads compared to an automatic which can preload the drivetrain, doesn't shock the system nearly as hard, can build boost on launch, loses no acceleration or boost on shifts, etc.
If I raced my M235 competitively, or any late model performance car for that matter, I'd be a complete idiot to choose the manual. It's slower, more expensive to maintain, and it would likely not handle the abuse over the long term and would likely loose the 1-2 and 2-3 syncros over time. HOWEVER, I don't race the car for time or money. I just enjoy driving and the engagement, thus, I have a 6MT. Some days it annoys the living hell out of me as I do not find it to be the easiest manual to drive smoothly when starting out or on the 1-2 shift, but in all other cases, it's stellar. Drive this car hard and the 6MT really becomes amazing.
I'm also always amused when you park the car at something like a cars and coffee and people go nuts because they had no idea the car is available in a 6MT.
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I've never broken a manual transmission in 1.4M miles. My first automatic... blew it up in 74,000 miles.
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A manual transmission can be set to "comfort", "sport", and "track" modes simply by the technique and speed at which you shift it; it doesn't need "modes", modes are for manumatics that try to behave like a real 3-pedal manual transmission. If you can money-shift it, it's a manual transmission. "Yeah, but NO ONE puts an automatic trans shift knob on a manual transmission."