within 10 years people will make the same argument about steering wheels.
I think its all about control (for me at least). Wanting to control and operate a machine within my capabilities and improve on that.
^and you say it quite correctly: "my auto is faster", in the sense you have a machine that does it faster for you.
For me its more like I want to improve. I want to get better. When a machine takes that out of your hands, it means that some engineer way back in Munich (Friedrichshaven in this case
) is faster.
The same goes for launch control. It has nothing to do with the driver (you or me as an individual) but all about some engineer sitting in some office at the other side of the world punching in the correct numbers.
So I think people who are very manual focussed are more interested in themselves as a driver (the technical aspect, not the traffic aspect).
That engineers can come up with technical inventions that go beyond the skill of a human is not that strange. I'm sure that if you make an automated car with automated steering, in the end a team with engineers will be going way faster around a circuit lap than any human driver can. But is that the point? Is that fun?
For me the (manual) shifing is just as much part of driving like steering or braking or controlling the throttle.
Learning and applying the tricks of optimal control and timing within the shift&throttle process, just as much as trying to find the optimal driving line when it comes to steering.