Standard/Manual Gears VS Automatic

[HypoToad]

I just got a wheel and have been improving dramatically over the past few days, I just did my best time at SPA with the Audi R8 LMS (not the Kunos one, by AGU), don't laugh, 2.19.77 using automatic gears, watching my replay I can see I'm not using all the track so I can improve on that. But is it faster using manual gears with the straight line shifter or switches on the back of the wheel, no clutch. I would have to learn how to do that, I have only driven auto's for the past 25 years IRL.

I was listening to a car show the other night on the radio and the so called expert said the quickest sports cars today all have auto's, is that true?

I see replays on YouTube where they tell you what gear they use for what corner and you can see where they change up/down.

So the question is are they that much quicker and is it worth going through the learning faze?

 

[Leonardo Chaves]

Most supersports cars in the world at least have the option of full auto gears as of today i think.
GT racers are semi automatic though.

I'm not really sure how much you can gain in terms of lap time in AC by switching gears yourself (mainly because i never used auto...), i'm going to assume something between 0,5 and 1,5 s.

Shifting manually has 2 big advantages(talking practical advantages, leaving "it's more involving" aside), engine braking, most games (all?) are very conservative on their downshifts and you loose some time there.
The second advantage is short shifting, short shifting is something that you can use to get a cleaner corner exit.

Once you get over the initial hump it's pretty easy to figure out which gear to use on each corner, i can do a pretty close prediction just looking at a track map...
And even if i get a prediction wrong it's pretty easy to figure out on an exploratory lap wether i should be one gear higher or lower at a certain corner.

Gearing becomes second nature to the process of memorizing a track, where you on auto gears think "brake hard at the 100 meters board for the hairpin", i think "brake hard and down to 2nd at the 100 meters board for the hairpin".

It's well worth the adjustment period IMO, choose a car and track combo that you enjoy, nothing super tricky to drive and memorize the corners and it's ideal gears, once you are comfortable with that combo you can move to another track, the adaptation will be much quicker after the first one.

 

[Hor-hay]

 

[Mr Deap]

In Gran Turismo there a Tesla & Prius.

Playing with CVT or one gear car is hard to understand to push. When you brake the engine doesn't make noise, when you mash the accelerator, there's a sudden burst of torque. It's as difficult to play with the 917/30 in term of getting result.

 

[Turk]

You're bound to be slightly faster manually switching gears. The autobox doesn't know anything about the road in front of you so is likely using a pretty crude way of deciding what gear to be in.

It's not really that difficult to learn, no reason not too.