After the St. Trop event, we did the Routes des Grandes Alps which makes Route Napoleon look like a cakewalk.
On suggesting to one of the combatants that it must have been hard work in his manual car, he said that he just left it in second and let the torque do the work in the corners and revved it in between.
Whereas with the auto in sport, it was easy to manually change between 2nd and 3rd, with even 1st on a couple of the serious corners. All at the touch of the gearstick easy and fast.
Not quite what he said,
and at least certainly not what he meant
he said it didn't really matter as they were virtually all 2nd gear corners and necessitated no change as second was perfect. FWIW he also said at the end of the day his knee ached from the on/off nature of the drive but as this was his right knee the auto box would make no difference.
I drove an auto S4 down to St Tropez last year and did the track day at Paul Rickard (or whatever it's called these days) in it, and whilst the auto is very capable it is no substitute for a manual on track or when pushing hard on the col's we just did.
I will always always choose an auto for my everyday car. But for a car like my Aero (and I disagree with whoever said the Aero8 is just a GT, can't remember who said it and I'm paraphrasing somewhat) the manual will always be the nicer box for me. Of course in traffic jams or stop start traffic it's a no brained but I only tend to use the Aero for long fun trips and so this isn't an issue. Even on motorways, I normally go 1st, 3rd, 4th then 6th and will only drop out of 6th if I really need to muster some serious acceleration.
I also recall last year getting really frustrated with the auto box on the autoroute as it needed a bit of a hefty kick to drop out of auto 6th (which seemed quite a bit higher than the manual 6th?). And whilst putting the box in sport negated this and gave an instant kick down, leaving it in sport meant it wouldn't go into top gear (6th) and so you then felt it wasn't really cruising comfortably.
Really frustrating and a bit of a faux pas in my view but maybe they've changed the settings? Maybe a more current auto owner can confirm or otherwise.
And of course, blipping the throttle on down changes, that fabulous cacophony of side-pipes
You can probably tell, manual any day for me! (until paddles and a proper automated manual box).
