Quote:
Originally Posted by mkorgan
Great question to which I will give my best answer. I am not a professional racer but I have a lot of track time in many different cars. Here is my problem...if you put the car in SPORT mode and let the car select the gear for you it select gears that put you too low in the RPM range to optimally pull out of a corner. For example, you are decelerating from 110 to 45 to take a sharp left hand turn, the car will drop out of seventh to fourth when I would prefer it drop to third or even second with a quick shift on the corner exit. With the paddles, the delay in dropping multiple gears in both the display telling you what gear you are in AND the actual downshifting of the transmission itself is such that by the time you get 3/4 of the way through the turn and want to hit the paddles to get back on it, they are still going down the gear tree which then delays your upshifts on exit.
I will admit, I am not an expert on driving autos on a road course BUT I have driven an auto GTR, M4, C6, and a S4 and found them much more responsive and "intelligent" in keeping the car in the power band throughout the course. If I was Randy Pobst I might be able to get a better result but the reason I got in the car in the first place was that my buddy who owns it was getting frustrated and new I had more experience than he did and wanted me to see if I could get a better result than he was getting....I did not.
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Thanks. That makes sense. Like I said, I've never tracked an auto (plenty of manuals) but I have obviously done some spirited heavy braking turns on the street with my 335i A8 and my wifes Q60S A7 that both have paddle shifters and I can definitely confirm that at those deceleration speeds, it's extremely easy to not have any clue how many times you've pulled on the paddle and forget which gear you've gone into. And at that point I don't want to concentrate on looking at what gear I'm in, I want to be concentrating on hitting the apex and my other marks. Thanks again.