Revealed this week at the Geneva auto show, the new Porsche 911 GT3 is quite the machine.
It comes with a naturally aspirated flat-six engine that revs to 9,000 r.p.m. It has 500 horsepower and is only available with rear-wheel drive. It seats just two, and is fitted with huge tires and aggressive aerodynamics. And, if you’d like the option, you can get it with a manual transmission.
This is a pretty big deal. When Porsche released the previous version of this car, the only option was their PDK dual-clutch gearbox. The argument went that, as the 911 GT3 is the choice of car for the track enthusiast, the quicker shifts and overall better performance of the PDK made a great deal more sense than an old school stick shift.
Generally speaking, Germans tend to be a people who embrace common sense solutions. Certainly German engineers aren’t known for being willfully nostalgic. If a solution is quicker and more efficient, it is the best. What’s everyone complaining about?
The problem is that the 911 GT3 is not an actual race car. Yes, it has many of the attributes of a racing machine, and will no doubt be very quick indeed around a racetrack, but it’s unlikely to be entered into any actual races. Real race cars need roll cages and fire suppression systems, and usually can’t be driven on the road. The GT3 is intended for a person who really likes a fast 911, and wants something pure, and elemental, and raw.
That sort of person still wants at least the option of getting a manual transmission.
When I last wrote about Porsche’s pig-headedness in not offering a proper manual gearbox in their halo 911, I received a few complaints from people who wished to argue that the dual-clutch gearbox was a manual. Yes, it had no clutch pedal, they argued, but you could shift it with the paddles on the steering wheel. That’s manual.
These people were – what’s a polite way to say this? – wrong. While current modern transmissions can incorporate clutches instead of torque converters, and while everyone offers some sort of way for the driver to have control over gear selection, they are not true manuals unless they will not move without you manually selecting each gear.
PDK may be the best path to being flawlessly fast around a track, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most satisfying method. Sometimes, you just want to do your own shifting by hand.
Now, as the car has evolved, we’ve left a few things by the wayside. Technology advances, and we move on. Nobody is pining for the days when you had controls for throttle and ignition advance on the steering wheel.
However, the manual transmission persists even as it is surpassed by various types of automatic transmissions, both in speed and efficiency. Increasingly, it’s a rare offering, and not something that the average consumer looks for. However, demand is still out there.
The reason for this is a little hard to explain. I can’t really tell you why it’s more fun to row through the gears in the manual version of the Golf R than it is to simply floor the throttle in the dual-clutch version and let the transmission sort things out. It just is.
Perhaps it’s a question of skill and driver involvement. It’s considerably more difficult to slurp down coffee and a bagel when you’re driving a stick shift, because you’ve got more to do.
Secondly, driving a manual gives you a greater sense of what the car is doing. Long-time stick-shift enthusiasts will know that blipping the throttle at just the right time spins up the engine so that a downshift can be perfectly smooth. With a little practice, you can nail it with the side of your foot or heel, turning your regular commute into a bit of a waltz.
These are tricky skills to master, and if you’ve never driven anything other than an automatic, you have to keep an open mind. It’s not just a case of enthusiasm either: a friend of mine who competes in club-level endurance races found himself having to teach a winning young racer how to rev-match downshift, simply because the young man had gone directly from karts into race cars. He’d never even driven a manual.
So, the future for the manual doesn’t look particularly bright. It’s disappeared from supercars entirely, and can’t be found on the majority of vehicles sold today. Crossovers? Forget it. Only Subaru still offers a manual version of pretty much everything they sell (though not with every engine option), and that’s something they do pretty much only for the Canadian market.
And yet, the manual transmission persists. People seek out manual Subaru WRXs and manual GTIs. Manual versions of used cars often fetch more than their automatic versions simply because of rarity and demand. When Porsche released the 911R, a crazily expensive version of the GT3 that came with a manual, it sold out immediately.
A few weeks back, I found myself parked beside a 911 C4S. The C4S (all-wheel drive, S for slightly more power) is a pretty subtle car, devoid of the big wings of the GT cars or the big power of the Turbo models. It’s expensive, but not showy. Ordinarily, they’re almost all equipped with the PDK. I peeked in the window – manual!
When the owner came out, I thanked him for sticking with the stick shift. He grinned, said that there weren’t that many left of the road.
He was, of course, correct. Yet even so, even as the pool of manual-transmission vehicles shrinks, you kind of get the feeling that the days of the stick shift aren’t as doom and gloom as everyone keeps saying. There’s still something special about shifting for yourself, and until we’re all confined to autonomous pods, there’ll still be at least one person out there nailing a perfect heel-toe downshift with a grin on their face.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. If you have a suggestion for a column, or would be interested in having your car club featured, please contact him at [email protected]. Follow Brendan on Twitter: @brendan_mcaleer.
