Re: top gear on now incase you forget!

I was going to get abusive but remembered there was a jag link with you somewhere. (c:

Those 2 gearchanges are made worse in my car by the very perceptible torque convertor lock out engaging and disengaging on 3rd and 4th (4 speed box) and silly high gearing.

However, before I reach the corner in said scenario I press the "sport" button, and it holds on to the kicked down gear usually (almost always with practice) for long enough to brake and still be there when you get to the other side to accelerate away. I also find slowing down before the corner and punting it round on the power can be good fun too.

The other trick in my experience is using "sport" and "3" or "2" for some rev happy action. Clunking the gearstick around almost defeats the purpose of the auto I suppose but yeilds good results and you only have forward and back movements with no clutch to worry about. My car will kickdown to 2nd at 70mph and pull to ~85 given the chance.

Douglas

I do it at work quite often on downchanges as our Van gearboxes arent the sweetest in town.

Douglas

P'raps your autobox is cleverer than the Jag one, or the computer's gone mad. Not impossible on an old Jag ;).

It does have the J-gate, but I find it slightly odd to use. Perhaps with a few more miles of country road driving, I'll have sorted it. Fantastic thing for the motorway and town mind. Might have to do some fooling around with the Sports switch too.

It seems alright to me, though I've gotten nowhere near the limits on cornering speed, and driven precisely zero other big auto cars. Not a tremendous amount of feedback when you drive it, and it's not mine. Nice line in power oversteer though.

He's "lucky that hundred shot of NOS didnt blow the welds on the intake" (c;

Douglas

I find it a bit counterintuitive at the moment. I'll have to fiddle more.

The clutch doesn't bother me too much, and you always do without it if you really want.

Exactly. Stuff with knackered boxes, and stuff with funny boxes, like my old Volvo.

dream on, how many miles down the straight after the corner is that then. :D

Indeed, I did 175 miles in 3 hours tonight in the Merc, about 60 of them on A and B roads. Great fun.

166 bhp is a bit frustrating after the Sierra, but rivetting the cruise to 80 on the M6 doesn't half make life so much more relaxing.

haha very funny... i always thought it ment changeing gear while keeping your foot on the accelerator?

Ahhhh a film by seppos for seppos. Remember /they/ think you are a god because you can drive a "stick shift"...

Twin Turbo Autos are faster 0-100 than manuals allegedly. My mates (about

400bhp) feels pretty nippy...

No, that's called driving with even less mechanical sympathy than me, if you're talking about upchanges. I've done them in the Volvo, but I knew I was getting rid of that. The F1 commentator bods call it "powershifting" IIRC, though the F1 car will no doubt have some trickery to actually cut the spark or something to drop the revs rather than deliberately hammer the f*ck out of the clutch and transmission.

If you're talking about downchanges where you don't come off the throttle, it's called a sustained gearchange.

Not true - if you want to cruise around in a big ford a Jaguar is more suited - Astons are targeted at the Ferrari market these days. Give me an F430 over any aston any day - the only redeeming feature of the Vanquish is the stereo and the extra four cylinders.

As for the manual autoboxes (or are they auto manualboxes) they are good enough for the Enzo so they're good enough for me!

Surely it depends on the particular box more than anything? Some are good, some are s**te. Same as most other things.

Er, why on earth would you do that ?

Your clutch would become shafted in a VERY short space of time !!!!!

Er, with an automatic you don't have to change gear.

Really !

If you wanna go fast, then you just press the go pedal - and voila. You're going fast.

As long as there's enough power to overcome the transmission loss, and the AutoBox isn't a steaming pile of shit, they make a *very* good companion to a nice engine.

See Ferrari for details - they sell well under 10% of their cars with the optional manual box these days.

WTF? Sky *is* for pikeys!

Peter

-- "Diamonds are what I really need - think I'll rob a store, escape the law, and live in Italy. Lately, my luck has been so bad, you know the roulette wheel, it's a crooked deal, I'm losing all I had."

Yeah, funnily I could see that line in the back of my mind too.

"I live my life one quarter of dolly mixtures at a time".