Shifting comfort of the thirties
Some people associate pre-war sports cars with rustic equipment and coarse behavior. But there was another way. Some, mostly more expensive cars of the 1930s used the Wilson Preselector gearbox.
With this, the desired gear could be preselected with a lever, while the actual gear change was then required using a foot pedal. However, this foot pedal was not a clutch pedal, even though it felt similar. In fact, the "clutch" was part of the gearbox, which was designed as a planetary gearbox.
Driving with a Wilson preselector gearbox is very simple. If you want to shift from first to second gear, for example, you move the preselector lever to the corresponding position. Nothing happens yet, only when you press the foot pedal down and release it again is the gear actually "in".
The picture shows the Wilson preselector lever on a Talbot-Lago from France, which is why the neutral position is labeled "Point Mort" ....
A Wilson gearbox was elaborately designed and expensive, so why go to all that trouble if it actually takes just as much work to change gear as any other car? Well, back then you had your hands full in the bends and sometimes also on uneven roads and were probably happy to be able to preselect the manual gear change when there was an opportunity to do so, e.g. before instead of in the bend. And, of course, the pre-selector gearbox relieved the driver of the intermediate throttle/clutch, which was still necessary for noise-free gear changes with practically all manufacturers at that time.
P.S. Incidentally, if the preselector gearbox had become established across the board, our publication would hardly be called Zwischengas today, because hardly anyone would remember it ...
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