Bye-Bye Stick Shift

Since the 1890s, when it really was hard to do properly, skillful gear shifting has been the hallmark of the expert and the measure of the difference between the men and the boys. After all, a bright ape could be in taught to steer; in fact, bright apes have been taught to steer. Lindsay Schmidt, owner of an 1800-acre farm in Australia, uses a chimpanzee named Johnnie as a tractor driver, and has for years. Johnnie can steer a straight course over a plowed field, turn the tractor at the end of the furrow and keep this up all day. A couple of years ago a Southern highway patrolman was obliged to take into custody an ape who was going to Florida for the winter at the wheel of an Austin-Healey. His friend and owner was sitting beside him, apparently to read the road map.

There is no reason to doubt that, given loving kindness, patience and a sufficient supply of bananas, any upper-I.Q. monkey could be taught not only to steer but to go on to the next step and shift gears, and I wish someone would put this worthwhile project in train. It would be to (continued on page 241)Bye-Bye Stick Shift(continued from page 161) strike a blow for progress. We must eradicate the notion that a downshift from fourth to third at 80 mph takes the ear of a French-horn player and the tactile sensitivity of a brain surgeon. We have to face the fact that while driving a fast automobile is one of life's kicks, one needn't be a superman, a bright monkey can do it, and judged from the point of view of miles-to-accident ration, the high-grade moron is best of all. One doesn't even need to know how to shift gears, the automatic transmission is here to stay. The hand-writing came clearly on the wall when Jim Hall, present road-racing champion of the United States, began to run away and hide from everyone, driving a Chaparral with a two-speed automatic in it. Hall isn't the first to have run a race car on an automatic, but it looks as if he has found a better combination than anyone else. When he and Hap Sharp won this year's Sebring 12-Hour Race, on a circuit requiring 15--20 gear shifts a lap from old-fashioned machinery, beating assorted Ford GT's, Cobras and Ferraris, they stuck the final seal of doom on the stick shift.

During the 1950s, when the big Candillac-stuffed Allards stalked the land, slaying lesser fry, there was a lot of experimentation with automatic transmissions, not all of it successful. I remember a garage in Sebring, 1952, 11 or 12 o'clock at night, the place the usual welter of spare tires, bare light bulbs, squashed coffee containers, a driver coming in on a pickup truck, furious, to report that his Cad-Allard, running an automatic, had locked up, or selected reverse, he didn't know which, on the way to the circuit for a tryout. The road to the course at Sebring runs through orange groves, and he had gone backward into the soft, sandy earth, and stuck. Another driver, scheduled to drive an indentical car, was considerably moved by the news. One could see the idea bang through his brain: It was one thing for a transmission to lock solid at 40 miles an hour, rumbling along a country road, and something else again at 140, on the circuit. He sat, suddenly, on a running-board. Two years before, though, 1950, a Cadillac-Allard running a Hydra-Matic transmission had won Sebring overall, Fred Wacker and Frank Burrell up.

Automatics ran at Watkins Glen, even a Bugatti, a Type 54 Grand Prix car owned by Dr. S. L. Scher with a Dynaflow in it, Bill Milliken driving. The Bugatti was less than sensational, but Allards in the hands of Wacker and Burrell, Cal Counnell, A. E. Goldschmidt and Fred Warner campaigned all over the place, even in the Argentine. What happened to them? They didn't return enough advantage to justify their high cost and maintenance complexity; drivers like Briggs Cunningham, Fred Wacker and James Kimberley saw that the Candillac and Chrysler engines, good as they were, and big enough to accept the losses inherent in 1950 automatics, could not outlast three or four liters of Ferrari, and Enzo Ferrari didn't sell bare engines, he sold race cars, complete with stick shifts. The automatic transmission idea went on the shelf for a while.

Not only mechanical factors were responsible. The mystique had a lot to do with it, the idea that gear shifting is an exotic skill. This notion, like so much else in motor racing, came to the United States from England and was central to the support of the sport by people who would themselves never drive in competition, but whose need to associate themselves with competition drivers was essential to their pleasure, if not their security. When motor racing was new, a driver who hoped to get anywhere near the first rank had to be built like a weight lifter, or at least be as strong as one. Clutch-and brake-pedal pressures were fierce, the steering wheel, often geared almost I-to-I, delivered every road shock direct to the wrists, and gear levers had long throws. When a driver had a flat, he and the mechanic jumped out and changed it, and without the help of automatic jacks and half-a-dozen pit people, and they changed not the wheel, but the tire itself. They cut the old one off the rim with knives, levered the new one on, then pumped it up, and plenty of cars ate ten tires in a single race. A man who wasn't brutally strong simply could not drive competitively in the days of the Vanderbilt Cups, the early Targa Florio, and so on.

Even in the 1920s and 1930s strength counted. Movie shots of the big Auto-Union G.P. cars running down the straights in the middle 1930s showed their drivers making quick and continual steering corrections, and, earlier, Tazio Nuvolari, one of the four greatest drivers of all time, decided that he was too small and too light to horse the big cars around, and out of his inability evolved the driving style, the drifting, rhythmic, swinging way of going that so profoundly influenced everyone from his time onward. Today, raw strength counts for little. Steering is so light that 13-inch wheels offer plenty of leverage; gear-lever movements are short; pedal pressures are light. Engines are rear-mounted, so that drivers do not have to contend with ferociously high cockpit temperatures, high enough to take five pounds off a man in a race, high enough, indeed, so that blistered feet were no wild rarity. Condition matters, Grand Prix racing is not for weaklings, but tremendous physical strength, such as Piero Taruffi and Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio had, is not imperatively a part of a champion's armorarium.

But always there has been, as a constant, the ability to shift gears smoothly and very quickly, smoothly because at high speeds even a slight jerk in the drive line can cause the rear wheels to lose their grip on the road, a grip tenuous at the best of it, and give the driver, a second later, the problem of something going sidewise; quickly because when a car is in neutral, going up the box, it is coasting, it is not under power, and coasting wins no races; quickly going down the box because then the gears must be used for braking, and there is no braking power in neutral. Indeed, drivers have died because they missed shifts, nearly always downward, say from third to second, and thus lost vital braking power. Still, the skill was not hard to learn. Alfonso de Portago was inept at gear changing when he began to race, by his own admission, but he became expert in an afternoon.

Gear shifting has remained dear to the aficionado because it was the one attribute anyone at all could share with the Olympians. One might not be able to read the fine print of a newspaper across a room, as Moss could, or pick up the back end of a race car, as Taruffi could, or drive flat-out for three days and three nights, as Erik Carlsson could, but one could learn to shift gears as expertly, at least mechanically as expertly, as any one of them, and thus one shared a bond, and was enabled rigidly to exclude from the magic circle lesser lights who were show, or shook the car, or--appalling grossness!--made crunching noises. Such were referred to in print as "ham-fisted peasants" or "clots" or "boors who don't deserve to sit at the wheel of a good motorcar." In 1948 I was driving a noted British motoring journalist who criticized my gear shifting in a subtle but unmistakable fashion: He held himself lightly in the seat, pen-dulumlike, and let his head bob forward and backward as the clutch came in. The standard of shifting he enforced was usual with the inner circle: A passenger should feel nothing whatever in a gear shift, and hear nothing but rising or falling engine sound, the progress of the car, faster or slower, absolutely un-married. Racing drivers aside, the best I have known was a 60-year-old chauffeur, veteran of 30-odd years on Rolls-Royces. He could shift up through four gears and down through four, in steady progression, absolutely imperceptibly. He had, of course, been through the old Rolls-Royce school, in which four days of the curriculum were set aside for shifting alone.

Aesthetics aside, and snobbery, and the racing mystique, gear shifting has something else going for it: the relief of boredom. Driving an automobile is in essence boring. Just sitting there steering the thing doesn't provide much diversion unless one is going very fast. Constant gear shifting, with its suggestion of mastery over the vehicle, is midly entertaining, and the more gears the more entertainment. The Alfa Romeo Giulietta and the new Porsche 911, with five-speed boxes, are by some esteemed for that reason alone, and even for Mini-Minors a five-speed Colotti box is available. Six-speed setups have already appeared on some race cars, and will move to gran turismo cars. The smaller the engine, the faster it turns, the more gears one needs, to keep it within its maximum power range regardless of the road speed of the car; but even big engines, engines that could do nicely with only two speeds, are sold today with four-on-the-floor. In 1963, about 4 percent of all U.S. cars came off the line with four-speeds manual transmissions, 20 percent with three-speed. (The other 76 percent were, of course, automatics.) It's safe to say that all but a fraction of that percent of manuals went to male drivers, and safer, I suppose, to say that there was not one of them who did not, at some time in the first 60 days, think, Mittylike, slamming the short stick from fourth to third, that he was at one with Camille Jenatzy, or Jim Clark, or someone in between.

They're going to take that away, though. Every race-car designer in the world has screwed the midnight lamp to his drawing board, and the precedents are being shifted and reshifted, from the old rumbling Cad-Allards through the Hobbs automatic Lotus Elite, which laid down 15 wins in the 1961 sports-car season, to Hall's present rig, based on a General Motors unit. (Talk in the trade is that Hall's transmission came out of "the back door" at GM, a phrase that means little enough. Anyone can buy a GM component. For example, the standard supercharger used on the big dragsters is a GM diesel blower. But General Motors' position on racing at the moment is in compliance with the 1957 resolution of the Automobile Manufacturers' Association forbidding participation in or support of racing. GM says--and it's an argument hard to refute--that racing proves nothing that can't be better proven in the laboratory and on the factory test stand. The argument that horse racing "improves the breed" is a laughable sophistry, has been for decades, and the motor-racing parallel is little stronger in logic; Ford is deep in racing now, but Ford's motivation is financial, what else? Market research has shown the Dearborn executives that the war babies are growing up, convinced them that racing appeals to the late-teens and early-20s, and if you sell a Fairlane today you may sell a Continental 15 years from now.)

Back to the four-on-the-floor. Or the five-on-the-floor. Or the six-on-the-deck. Or, God spare us, the seven-in-the-slot. We come to the wondrous and esoteric "heel-and-toe" technique. When the tamed, housebroken motoring critics have said that the Gimmelsbar two-liter is absolutely great except that the horn note is perhaps a bit thin, and the headlights do not, actually, penetrate as far through the glim as they should, and the ashtray is not, truly, as easily accessible as it might be, they usually say as well that the position of the accelerator and brake pedals does not lend itself to the "heel-and-toe" technique. What, prithee, Mynheer, is this? Well, it is a way of wearing out a motorcar. The idea is this: You, Walter Mitty, are flying down Route 17 to the supermarket, and coming up is, as well you know, the right-angle turn into Main Street. You stay on the gas as long as you dare, then you twist your ankle, drop your heel onto the brake pedal and goose the accelerator with your toe, or the other way around, and go down a gear. Maybe, if you're very brave, and are going very fast, you drop two gears, bloop, bloop, and there you are, under heavy wheel and engine braking together, around the corner. In racing, the move makes sense because it satisfies the imperative necessity, before-cited, that the car shall never coast. In street driving, it's like carrying a sword cane to a cocktail party: Who needs it? Never mind, it's an essential part of the gearbox mystique. It's kicks, but it costs: Every time you goose an engine from 3000 rpm to 5500, you're rubbing steel off the bores and dollars off your budget. The way to come into a corner, unless your best friend is seven minutes from the delivery room, or the local law has commandeered you and is shooting from the other window, is to take your foot off and let the thing slope up to it. Still, what am I saying? You're Piero Taruffi keening through the outskirts of Bologna at 150 mph in the 1957 Mille Miglia, and who worries about the odd kopeck at a time like that?

In 1968, I dare say, there won't be a stick shift sprouting from the floor of a race car between this and Tokyo. You can't do long division, never mind solid geometry, as fast as IBM's great iron brain, and as long ago as 1952, I think, I saw Erwin Goldschmidt in a Cad-Allard Hydra-Matic open five car lengths on a sports Ferrari in the fat part of 300 yards. You, though you walk elbow to elbow with Parnelli and A.J. and Clark and Surtees, you can't, repeat, cannot, wiggle the stick that fast. The auto trans., as the types say, is here to stay. Only the comparatively slow march of technical progress has been holding it up. While the automatic was so inefficient that it absorbed a disproportionate amount of available engine power, race cars couldn't afford it, small passenger cars couldn't afford it, and it was really useful only on the big V-8s. Automatics put much more power on the road now than they used to, and leave less of it churning around inside in the trains of planetary gears, in the oil-filled torque converters; they're lighter, and race-car designers can use them, and revel in their great edge over the stick shift. An automatic can be set up to keep an engine turning at its peak power-producing rate whether the car's in a 30-mph hairpin or on a 190-mph straight, without any attention from the driver. This is very important, because some Formula I engines produce maximum power only within a very narrow range of revolutions per minute, say between 9000 and 10,800, the figures for the current BRM. This requires a driver to shift constantly--at Monaco, for example, every five seconds--and to watch the tachometer closely. On the street, one can listen to the engine; on the circuit, with earplugs stuffed in until they almost meet in the middle, it's harder, one must sense the torque the engine is putting out, one must rely on feel. The automatic transmission eliminates all this, and puts the driver in the position of the captain on the bridge of a ship-- he can pay attention to where the thing's going, and let the engineering department attend to the nuts and bolts.

Very well. And Q.E.D. And with the stick shift gone, how shall we amuse ourselves with the delusion that we are all pilotes? There's the steering wheel. Yes, but not for long. We steer automobiles by wheel because when the thing began, no other device could give enough leverage over so long a range. But, like the gearshift, the steering wheel was a compromise and a makeshift, and no one needs it anymore. If man is to make race cars go faster--and he will, because that's the nature of the beast--he will have to lie down, to reduce the frontal area of the vehicle; that is to say, he will have to lie down flat instead of merely half reclining as he's doing now. If he lies down, he won't have room to wind a wheel around and around. He'll steer with a limited-movement tiller, or with electronic push buttons, and then what, my masters, of the elegant straight-arm position, the geometrically crossed wrists in the hairpin turn, what of the string-back kangaroo-skin driving gloves?

No. Automation is the answer and the end. As a bulgebrained IBM technician said to me, "We will be the last people in the world to work." I asked Bill Frick, who was setting up automatics for race cars as long ago as anybody, how the future looked to him. Said Frick. "Certainly the automatic transmission is inevitable for race cars. We must face it. We must not throw our bare bodies across the path of progress. As for me, I look forward to the day when all Grand Prix and big-car racing will be slot racing, the manufacturers and owners at the controls. I can see Agajanian with one rheostat in each hand, and Ferrari, and Chapman, and six cars out there in slots running down the track, and the drivers just sitting in them so they won't look empty, and so the girl waiting for the winner at the finish line will have some place to hand the wreath."