[s-cars] "The Aluminum Crowd"/Tip vs. Manual Musings

[Bill Noland]

The euro S8 was originally available with a manual tranny, so I would 
imagine that this is a problem that could be solved by a liberal sprinking 
of U.S. currency. This may or may not be a good idea in the eyes of your 
local smog nazis. If I remember correctly, non-standard tranny swapping is a 
no-no under Kalifornia rules.

The wife decided to go the tip route, when we shopped for an allroad last 
year. (We had driven manual trannies exclusively, since we met in the 80's 
and, in my case, I owned one auto tranny car in my life, over 30 years ago.) 
The allroad is an '03, so it packs the "Sport" shifter (and no steering 
wheel tip buttons). To be honest, I play with the Tip from time to time, but 
the "S"(port) setting pretty much does the trick 90% of the time.

When I drove an RS6 with the Tip and steering wheel mounted paddles, I had 
great fun snicking up and down the gears. I wonder, if I had bought the RS6, 
if the paddles wouldn't have lost their novelty after a while. (I do know 
that I would have lost my license and depleted the world's oil reserves with 
constant WOT runs. Yee-haw!)

So, I have been and remain a manny-tranny junkie, even with the too frequent 
stop and go freeway slog here in Northern Kalifornia. Would never have 
considered a Tip in the B6 S4. Not when Audi finally got manual trannies 
right. Why just yesterday, a quick snick from 6th down to 4th and I was 
performing a highspeed freeway maneuver, that I had previously only read 
about in a comic book, but.....that's a story for another day.....

Bill N
Snickety, snick-snickin' in NorCal


> There's a guy Gabor in OH on AW D2 that fab'd up a 6spd install
> for his '97 A8.  Custom driveshaft and pedal box were part of it, and it
> seemed quite a bit of fab work was the order of the day.  Not for der
> squeamish in other words, def. not plug 'n play or even remotely close,
> unfortunately.  But, it's been done.  Hmmm.
>
> The tranny does "learn" (reference my previous "learn THIS!" comment heh
> heh) your size 10 preferences.  And yes, learning what Tip will and
> won't do and does and does not WANT to do, and how to integrate that
> into a seamless effective experience takes more than a week.  Heck, I'm
> just getting it down now 6 months into it.
>
> My only real beef, which I've worked around, is driving on the highway
> in "D", and stabbing it for a pass - sometimes I want WOT in 5th without
> the resultant downshift to 4th (or 3rd for that matter!).  Solution is
> simple, when I know I'm going to "need that", I just click over to Tip
> and it keeps it from happening.
>
> Realistically, I never use the "D" mode anyway, 100% tip here.  If I had
> a "Sport" shifter ('02/'03) I'd likely use "D" more cause THAT is a
> wicked nice f'n program.  But I'd again likely do my click to tip trick
> on highway to keep it from downshifting @ WOT in 5th.
>