It’s 2020. Frankly, I don’t give half a care what’s going on so long as there are three pedals and a shifter sticking up from the floor…and it functions properly. (Side-eying a car in the fleet now…) In a car like the Ford Mustang, it’s pretty difficult to find a reason to be unhappy with a six-speed. I know the automatics are perfectly competent, my experience driving the one that Rocky Mountain Raceways loaned me to drive around in during my trip out to the final throwdown at that track proved it. But there will always be that part of me that wants to sidestep the clutch and let all hell break loose. It’s an illness, a tic that won’t go away, but will only be satiated when I get to go completely off the rails. If you’ve barked second and third, you know what I’m talking about.

But a video was sent to me that did raise an issue: did Ford, by changing the ratios in the manual transmission, manage to shoot themselves in the foot? I figured I was in for some halfway coherent rambling about wide ratio versus close ratio and maybe something about too many gears. Instead, we have ratios, theoretical max speeds, crusing RPMs and stats from known tests. I know this kind of math…an engineer has been at work here and he just might have a point to the argument about the change being for the worse.

Then again, he does offer this bit in a pinned comment: “People, if you want to accelerate, put the car in the right gear for it! If you don’t want to shift gears, I hear they make transmissions that fit your needs.”

Thanks to Andy30thZ for the tip!