When tuners make cars slower
02/15/2023
Normally, the aim of a tuner is to make a car faster. But increasingly, it is not about maximum speed, but about the driving experience and the connection between man and machine. The hand-shifted transmission operated by a clutch pedal is one of the elements that many owners of fast cars are particularly fond of.
Unfortunately, it is a dying breed. At Ferrari you can hardly shift gears by hand any more, at Lamborghini just as little and at other manufacturers of sports cars and fast saloons, the manual gearbox is a discontinued model, if it is available at all.
Recently, tuners have stepped in and built what the manufacturer no longer wanted to offer. One of them is Modificata in Miami (USA). This company "improves" the Ferrari 458 Speciale with a classic 6-speed manual gearbox with gate, beautifully fitted and perfectly integrated. This does make the car a little slower and probably loses a few tenths of a second on the racetrack. No matter!
However, the fun is unlikely to be cheap, and the conversion will not be considered original in 20 or 30 years' time. But the pleasure gain should be considerable. At least the demo video gives you an idea:
Perhaps in future it really will be the tuners who can give us the driving experience that some of the cars that mother us don't want to give us. One can well imagine that there are other elements that could be simplified and thus made more durable for the classic car future ...
