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Nonono. Go drive a real race car or a shifter kart or a Lenco or a Hewland or a Quaife or any racing gear box ever made that's not an H/Z-pattern. Pull back for faster, push forward for slower. It correlates to the motion of your body during the acceleration or deceleration. Trying to push your hand forward why your body is being pushed backwards is totally illogical.
I don't have a real race car, but I have a car with auto that has manual mode with UP/+ away and DOWN/- towards you and it works for me. At the same time - when i had my Suzuki GSX-R I had to reverse the shift pattern to race style and found to be much better suited when going fast.
Bike shifters are reversed for a different reason. You can't put your boot under the shifter when you are that far leaned over to upshift
It's one of them, but not the only one. Point is that a lot of setups and decisions to make something are rather subjective. Some are more intuitive than others.
For example making paddle shifter with upper portion used for up-shift and lower for down-**** makes more sense to me, but Mazda has done the opposite. Making left paddle to downshift and right to upshift also makes more sense to me and Mercedes, Aston Martin and others agree.
Yes Porsche got it backwards with the shifter in 09-12... which they corrected in later generation cars!
The steering wheel has "buttons", identical left and right, with the same wrong direction - push to upshift.
So I started trying to get used to it, and I still get it wrong sometimes.
And then, I drove our Mazda5 where the up and downshift is correct. I immediately got used to it, and it made me get the Porsche wrong more often. Arrrrgghh!
I looked around to see if anyone reversed the shifter - someone has a nice writeup for the steering wheel, but the shifter supposedly is some kind of sealed unit and nobody has really hacked into it. (I prefer using the shifter!)
Additionally I can buy a paddle wheel which is an option Porsche sold - it is correct, left paddle for downshifting. But I'd rather the shifter got fixed.
At this point, I ordered the track-mode "sport+" shifting software which Porsche sells and can be programmed at a dealership. Everyone says they just use the auto and sport button on the street and sport+ on the track, and pretty much never use manual mode. The software is that good. We'll see.
Last edited by JasonC SBB; Oct 20, 2016 at 09:02 PM.
What's your opinion on the IMS issue on the first gen cars? The prices are starting to become very reasonable, but the specter of a $15k replacement engine due to a failed IMS bearing causes me pause.
You can find a car with an aftermarket bearing retrofitted. They all pretty much solve the problem completely. The retrofit costs about $2-3k if done by a shop.
You can find a car with an aftermarket bearing retrofitted. They all pretty much solve the problem completely. The retrofit costs about $2-3k if done by a shop.
I can confirm the 2-3k figure. My friends 07 Cayman went into a high-end shop in Dallas and it cost him $2700, I believe. One of his camshafts snapped in half when the shop was reassembling the engine, and that cost the shop a whole lot more lol.
Originally Posted by JasonC SBB
I drove an 06 with the factory short shifter. It was much, much nicer than standard. When upgrading there is a certain cable or attachment with some plastic in it that should be replaced with an aftermarket piece because they fail prematurely.
That confirms it. His shifter must be old and stretched, because it felt extremely vague and squishy.
You can find a car with an aftermarket bearing retrofitted. They all pretty much solve the problem completely. The retrofit costs about $2-3k if done by a shop.
Oh yea, the 986 Boxster and 996s IMSs are serviceable, but I wasn't very clear in my question. I'm interested in the first gen Caymans, 06-08, which use the redesigned IMS that can't be removed without splitting the case. From what I've read the risk is significantly lower than the 00-05 single row bearing, but still not great.
Take the cost of a replacement motor, multiply it by the worst case probability of catastrophic failure, which is what, 5% for the 987.1? That is the cost. Is the car still worth it?
So I took it to an autox with its random alignment and the new RE050A cars.
Holy terminal understeer, Batman!
Funny how a car can feel sublime on mountain roads yet feel like a wallowy pillowy pig at autox.
I had to get hard on the brakes to even make it turn in, and, on decreasing radius turns, had to tap the brakes.
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Is the car still worth it?
