Sanger

I have heard that gears will hurt your top end? Does this mean my overall top speed, or my highway pull for example? Will I trap higher in the 1/4 or lower if I increased the gears? I figure overall top speed will come down, but I don't care if I can't do 160mph because i never drive that fast anyways. So I guess what I'm really curious on is if my trap speeds will increase or not, and how the car will perform on the highway, and running from a roll? Will it perform faster or not?

MyShibbyZ28

It will be faster all around. At highway speeds and going to pass someone will be stronger. The dead stop to rolling speeds will be faster, and the trap time will be faster since you are accelerating quicker. Gears are a torque multiplier.

Lunch Box

I am assuming you are referring to the gears in the rear end

with lower gears you will accelerate harder/faster, but have a lower top speed (how much? depends)

with higher gears you will accelerate slower, but have a higher top speed

hope this helps clear things up

Capn Pete

Check out my sig to see the 1/4 mile gains of gears .

As far as highway, obviously your top speed is affected, but it's still possible to hit ~160 mph, but it's at the very top of 4th gear (and I don't know how good it is to push 4th like that?? ).

The pull on the highway is still good, but you have to manually pull the shifter back above certain speeds, because the computer won't allow the automatic downshift, even though the RPM's are still low enough at those speeds (such as around ~75 - 80 mph, there's still no problem downshifting to 3rd, because it's good 'til over 110, but the computer won't let it downshift).

The only other thing that you wouldn't think of, is that the car is hardly ever in 1st gear. I mean, under normal driving conditions, my car will be into 3rd gear before I cross an intersection! (and I'm just talking about a normal 2-lane road, not a wide multi-lane intersection!) AND, unless you're doing around ~20 mph or less, the car won't downshift back to 1st gear like it will with 2.73's (where the tranny downshifts to 1st even doing ~40 mph).

For 1/4 mile though, gears definitely help, and they don't kill traction like the common belief is .

Sanger

Thanks for all the replies guys! I was skeptical at first at getting gears, but they seem to perform all around which is what I was looking for. Looks like I'll have a new mod coming this summer.

Silver

Everybody needs LT1 Edit... then the gear changing/downshifting won't be a problem anymore.

After taking the laptop to my A4 I honestly don't think I could do any better with a 6 spd, even at the autocross.

Sanger

top end, you're reffering to top speed right? because I gathered from all this that my top end would be increased, hence i would trap higher in the 1/4 and pull harder on the freeway.

MyShibbyZ28

3 upsides, faster acceleration, faster track time, way funner.

LT1Formulation

I'm kind of curious what kind of mileage drop people have experienced in LS1 M6 cars going from stock 3.42's to 4.10's