The curtain is coming down on the manual gearbox. Which one should you grab before it's too late?
. Not quite the good, the bad and the ugly, but not a conventional triple test either - more a day-long appreciation of what their respective transmissions bring to the table. And there’s really no better place to start than the GR86. You don't need to move an inch to know where Toyota cut the cloth with its returning rear-drive sports car. As ever, the small details have been sweated.
So it says a lot about what Honda has achieved with the FL5 Civic Type R that it might be an even more enjoyable from a manual gearbox perspective. Cars with the big red ‘H’ on the front do have some form in this regard, sure, but its current solution is genuinely sublime. Everything that was good in the Toyota seems another level here, from the cool-to-the-touch gearknob to a throw seemingly as short as a sequential’s.
‘Seamlessly integrated’ is not how anyone would describe the manual gearbox of the M2. That unmistakeably spindly BMW lever sprouts out of the dash like a weed on a Wentworth green, unexpected and unwelcome in pristine surroundings. As enthusiasts, it’s hard not to smirk knowingly at such a thing protruding in a 2023 BMW M car, though it’s easy to imagine a more casual buyer being put off by how it jars with a tech masterpiece of a cabin . If, indeed, the dealer even has a manual M2.
Mostly because it means you get to tangle with that mighty straight-six. Finding third from first and feeling the twin-turbo 3.0-litre haul its way through every rev from idle to redline feels appropriately enlivening, power building all the way to 7,200rpm. A stick and a clutch encourage a bit of misbehaviour in an M car, too, whether that’s pulling away with a few too many revs and a bit of lock, or punching through gears as fast as you dare like a proper old touring car driver.
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