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Reply to "How do you make it rain in California?... buy a speedster."

 

Ted, a wise man once said,

A Wise Man said:

Ted, the berg shaft is FINE for your application... don't overthink it...what you got will be fine...

Remember that the main reason you're spending big bucks on five speeds is to fill the wide gap between third and fourth with two much smaller gaps. This immediately improves the quality of life and makes you a happier person. (Right away, you'll notice the difference in how small children and dogs respond to you.)

But if you then swap in a .82 for the .89, you're widening up one of those expensively obtained gaps again - making it almost as wide as your current gap between third and fourth. So yeah, the .82 will drop your revs at 80 from 3750 to 3450, but keep in mind, there's a price to pay.

The other 'price' is that when you come to a hill on the freeway, you'll have to downshift a lot sooner than you would with the .89. And now the gear you're downshifting into isn't the slight drop it would have been with the .89.

Like a lot of other things in life, there's no free ride with gearing. What you gain here, you always give up somewhere else.

I really don't like driving this car on the freeway. I tend to seek out smaller roads and take another car if I know I'm going to be on the freeway a lot. I can do 75-80 in the Speedster when I want to (or even 85-90 in a pinch), but I tend to settle down to 70 to cruise - and with the .89, that comes in at a comfortable 3250.

If you haven't already, play around with this interactive gearing mapper. Study it a while, and it will answer almost any question you might have - and probably better than any of us is able to with long-winded explanations like this.

 

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