alfadriver wrote:
I just think it's amusing to hear people talk about how great of a feeling it is to drive a manual car, yet many of them (this comes up on Miata.net all the time) drive one of the easiest cars to drive fast of all time. And one with a lot less feedback and real honest discussion than many other cars.
Hypocracy in car enthusiests is amusing. 
Error 404 Hypocrisy not found.
You've made this irrelevant point before in other versions of this discussion. If people disagree with you on this topic, you force a false black/white position upon them. If I want to shift my own gears and press my own clutch pedal, you think that means I must want to manually control spark advance and fuel mixture and drive a non-synchromesh transmission etc. etc. or else I am a hypocrite. Thanks for the label, but it's meaningless to me because it's based on a false dichotomy that you are asserting.
What you're failing to acknowledge is the distinction between a car that is mechanically engineered to be fun and rewarding to drive, and one that is digitally programmed to deliver perfect performance every time.
It's not that one takes skill and the other doesn't. Both take skill to get the most out of them; just somewhat different skills. It's not that one is better than the other. They each are better at some particular tasks. The real difference comes from what the individual driver finds rewarding.
Just because I find a more analog set of controls to be more rewarding does not mean I must be required to drive a Model T Speedster because it's the most analog vehicle ever created. That's your world view, not mine.
I am most rewarded by using whatever skills I have to manually control the dynamics of the car I'm driving. Note that I said dynamics - I'm talking about controls that directly make the car go, turn, and stop. It is not hypocritical to let the car take care of indirect items like spark and mixture. YES, you're right, technically those things do affect performance and the driving experience. I bow to your superior nit-pickiness on that. But it's not hypocritical to focus my attention on direct stimuli rather than indirect.
I'm impressed by the technology in a clinical, abstract way. I'm not excited by it. Who the berk cares if I can learn how to turn the special key, set the switch to Super Duper Sport mode, hold the brake pedal for the right number of seconds before stepping on the gas, and crack off digitally perfect launches followed by nanosecond upshifts? That's fun a couple times. After that, yawn.
I bet you like F1. Frankly, I couldn't care less about it. Yes, the cars have amazing capability. Yes, the drivers need lightning reactions and inhuman skill to drive them. So what? Pour enough money and programming into it, and you should be able to do anything. That doesn't make it exciting unless you are the kind of person who enjoys that. I'm not.
When I autocross, I turn off ABS and traction control in my car. Yes, I lock the brakes up sometimes. Yes, sometimes I can't get the power down as well as I should. Yes, it probably slows me down. But it's more satisfying to earn whatever time I can on my own, even if it's slower than the car is technologically capable of.
Like what you like, it's no skin off my ass either way. But I'm not automatically a hypocrite or a reactionary just because I don't like the same things other people do.
