Leawood911:

 

As Frayed pointed out (many pointless posts ago) the new engine can leverage that power and those revs much better with the new gear ratios. So what is the speed in gears 1-7 vs the 4.0 six speed manual!  You will be amazed and the performance advantage will be clear.  The ratios make all the difference.  More so than shift speed.  Of course it would be nice to adjust track by track because each track has its own gearing requirements.

 

While 7 closely stacked ratios is a huge deal, one should add that it's PDK that allows extraction of all those gears.  IMO, based on the car's specs and what has been written so far, the entire package including PDK was engineered as a complete unit and a MT would likely not suit this car well.

Narrow powerband, peaky high revving motor, insane 9k redline enabled by PDK (built in over rev protection allows the designer to push that valvetrain to its limits).  7 speeds + PDK allows the motor to reside at max hp more of the time on track than with a MT.

Of course the other major benefit for the majority of us who sometimes mess up a heel toe downshift is perfect rev matching at corner entry.  BUT, this is now accomplished in Porsche's current MT so this is less of a benefit due to PDK.  It's just a feature of newer modern transmissions (see new vette stingray as well).


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991 GT3 incoming, 964 Turbo 3.6, E36 M3 ltw S54 conversion, bunch of other stuff