The charm of crashing and scratching
07/21/2015
We are so spoiled today. The few manual vehicles you can still buy today allow smooth and completely silent gear changes. Intermediate throttle unnecessary. Moving the gearshift through the gears with feeling is pure luxury. Things used to be different! Many a gearbox was happy to resist the driver's attempts to perform elegant and quiet shifting maneuvers. On the contrary, the gearbox scratched and the transmission crackled, making many a pilot ashamed of his apparent lack of driving skills.
No wonder some owners opted for more modern gearboxes and had a Moss four-speed gearbox replaced by a more modern Getrag version or went straight for a gearbox from a more modern car that could somehow be fitted into the old car. This certainly improves shifting comfort, but doesn't something fall by the wayside? Isn't it just part of the fact that old cars are not so easy to drive and require more care? Isn't there a considerable increase in pleasure when you can actually engage a gear smoothly because you've given the right amount of intermediate throttle?
We recently drove a car over sixty years old with a modern (retrofitted) five-speed gearbox, whose shifting precision was unreservedly convincing and whose rev-reducing top gear certainly benefits the car and its usability. In the end, however, we did ask ourselves whether this modification had lost some of the driving pleasure and whether the classic car had lost some of its charm with the upgrade ...
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