Like a lot of folks, I started playing racing games seriously around the time the first Gran Turismo game came out. I’ve always been into racing games, but that one was the first that really made me try and hone my craft, if you will. What finally convinced me to go to a manual gear control setup was the fact that I couldn’t get gold on the various challenges without it, and I've never considered going back to automatic for serious racing since then.

So without further ado, here are my top 5 reasons to choose manual shifting over automatic:

1) Automatic Transmission is for pussies. Ok, so this is the least legitimate of the reasons, but what happened to the gung-ho days of yore, when every guy I knew loved driving a stick? How come these same testosterone-fueled males jump on Forza and play on automatic? I really don’t get it. You’d think that just for the sake of being a man about the whole thing, they might switch to manual. Nope. Just about everybody I know goes auto.

2) The racing simulations penalize you for going with automatic with each shift. If I had to rank these in order of importance, this would be number one, no doubt about it. You see, all of the automobiles worthy of being in a racing game are really manual transmissions. That is to say, if one chooses to play with an automatic transmission, that only means that the computer is doing the shifting for you, not that the car itself is switched to an automatic transmission. Everybody knows that of course, but I point it out because despite that fact, people whose cars are being shifted on automatic take just a slight – though noticeable – moment longer than manual shifters in Forza 2.

I first noticed this when trying to figure out how the guy who used to dominate the MaddenMania races (LJ27MVP) did what he did. I watched one of his replays with the RPM gauge up, and thought that maybe there was an advantage to the way he paused without gas before shifting. Well, that wasn’t really him at all, he plays the game on automatic. He would have the gas pushed down, but when the car would shift there would be a momentary letting off of the gas for a moment before the shift. If you play on manual, you don’t have to let off the gas to shift. Of course you’ll lose power for a moment when you shift, but it’s much less pronounced. Just as a pure guess, I’d guess that in Forza 2 you lose an average of 1/8 to 1/16th of a second every single time you shift, if you’re racing on automatic.

3) Manual gives you more control. If one is using automatic shifting, they are at the whim of the transmission and/or the computer doing the shifting in terms of what gear the car is in, and where. There are certain cars that have so much power that you really need to feather the gas to keep the wheels from squealing. While using manual shift, one can keep the car in a lower power band, or shift to the next gear if the tires aren’t grabbing, etc. The computer won’t know to do that for you.

After I’ve got the general line of a track down, the major time improvements that I make (other than tuning the car for the track) tend to be shifting based. For instance, I’ll notice that I’m down shifting even though the RPMs weren’t going below 4,000. The automatic might down shift here, might not, but it doesn’t really matter. By not down shifting on certain turns it saves valuable seconds (as the act of shifting costs you seconds when accelerating). Another small example is that many of the tracks in these games have rises that get you just a split second of air. For whatever reason, these bumps are often positioned in places that I find myself at or near redline. I simply shift at that split second when I’m in the air, and it saves me another moment over somebody whose auto tranny decided to shift when his tires were making contact.

4) It amplifies one’s rhythm on the course considerably. Understand that shifting will eventually become like breathing; one won’t even notice he’s doing it. As one drives lap after lap while racing and practicing, he eventually gets into a real groove with the combination of turning, accelerating, braking, shifting, etc. If the driver hits a straight – turn - chicane – straight – turn – turn – straight combination and is only turning, braking, and accelerating, there are long periods where the driver is just holding a button. If he is shifting on the straightaways, it unconsciously gives him a much better idea of how much time he has until the next turn, since he is in fact shifting (for the most part) the same number of times, in the same places, on each straight. One might know that just a moment after shifting into fourth gear he has to again hit the brakes. Combining that unconscious knowledge with the visual knowledge of seeing the turn come into view helps him to nail the exact timing of each turn much more consistently than somebody who is just pushing the A button down that same straight.

5) It’s not that hard. In almost every racing game that I play, I typically think “well, I won’t be playing this game long enough to go through the hassle of learning to shift.” But once I set about shifting manually, it’s never more than a few races before I’ve got the feel of it.

In fact, all games are slightly different in terms of the shifting element. The location of the tachometer on the screen, for instance, makes it highly uncomfortable for me to shift in Grid. I’m getting used to it, though. Golf and my talkative wife, respectively, have taught me that I have almost no hand-eye coordination or multi-tasking skills to speak of. In other words, if I can do it, you can do it. People think to themselves, “well I don’t wanna drive like crap by practicing my shifting in a real race, because it’ll cost me the race.” For one, practicing the shifting and learning it well enough to race with it will not take that long. For another, if there’s a manual shifter on the track you’re probably not winning anyway. He has too many advantages. Might as well learn.

-Bryan Clark is a staff writer for Operation Sports and is also a forum administrator at MaddenMania.