Quote:
Originally Posted by Remonster
Porsche claims that they physically can't shorten 1st and 2nd gears in their transmission in addition to not wanting to spend the money to develop a new manual transmission just for the 718 4.0 cars. They primarily design their cars for their home country where performance at 150mph+, cruising RPM at 100mph, etc. are important on the Autobahn so they wouldn't want to change their final drive ratio.
Here in the US, if I got a GT4 or more likely a GTS 4.0, the first thing I would do is install the Autoquest final drive mod to shorten all six gears by 19%.
I've driven plenty of 981 GT4s and my overriding memory of them is wishing they had more of a feeling of acceleration in-gear and would rip to redline more rapidly, aside from this I don't have many complaints.
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It’s a joke if they claim they can’t physically shorten the gears as there are small companies in the US who have done just that without the billions of dollars and engineering resources of VAG.
As for autobahn cruising, M3/M4s have reasonable lower speed gears as well as well balanced gears for higher speed cruising. This is not a one or the other proposition. The original 930 turbo had a 4 speed manual for god sake. I’m sure they could figure it out with a properly sorted 6MT or even the 7MT if they really wanted to have closer gear spacing.
If Chevrolet and Ford can offer the option of several final drive ratios for corvettes and mustangs, Porsche can swing lower gearing for all the other markets outside of Germany where there are speed limits.