For the joy of shifting gears
05/23/2023
We've philosophized from time to time about how shifting gears manually creates a particularly intimate relationship with the mechanics of a car. You are simply more involved when you move the gear lever through the gearshift lanes and open and close the clutch at the right moment. Intermediate clutch and intermediate throttle is then the freestyle.
The builders of concept cars and prototypes have apparently also recognized this. In any case, a brand new one-off called the Kode61 Birdcage was on display at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este . And anyone looking into the cockpit immediately recognized the six-speed manual gearbox. Cool.
On Saturday, a Ferrari 550 Maranello from 1997 was also sold at RM/Sotheby's for a record price of EUR 286,250 or CHF 277,663. You guessed it, it was manual (... and had low mileage, admittedly).
Nowadays, if you want to buy a new car or a young used car with at least 200 hp, you will hardly find a manual transmission anymore. Only specialty cars are still sold with a classic manual transmission on request and sometimes for a considerable surcharge. You can find one at Porsche, BMW or Lotus, but not at Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz or Ferrari. High-horsepower everyday cars are almost 100 percent equipped with automatic transmissions, as are electrically powered cars.
Where will this lead? We suspect that, at least for a certain period of time, manual classic cars will achieve significantly higher ratings than DSG/converter automatic alternatives. Whether this will continue when the generation of manual transmission drivers dies out, however, is another question ...
However, this question will never arise with the Ferrari 250 GTO, which was only available with five manual gears. That's a good thing!
