You're right about the shifting down. This nonsense about it being bad for the drive train started when people quit learning how to drive a manual transmission properly. (Or at all.) You do not put it in the lower gear and then slide the clutch out ever so slowly to keep from feeling a jerk. I can't believe anyone who owns a Porsche really has to hear that. I just mention it because it's where the myth arose of downshifting somehow 'hurting' the car. If you do not use a clutch that way, then it doesn't harm the drive train at all to downshift. If you want to use the brake to control your speed, buy a slush box for all love.

Now about that notchy feel. Let's get some better words here. Notchy is not a bad thing in a sports car's transmission linkage. It means a clearly defined gate and a solid tactile feel for the gear engaging. That's good. What you describe is either resistance to entering the gate or a resistance to the gears engaging. Trouble entering the gate is a linkage issue. The gears resisting engagement is related to the type of synchros used and how much you're expecting them to accomplish. Let's take those one at a time.

I have a 997.2 and I can't say I've had any problem at all with the linkage. None. The transmission and linkage on our NSX were the best I'd ever seen on any car. Until this one. I wouldn't rate it better, but just as good while having a different feel. In fact, the one aspect I prefer is the slightly greater notchiness on three and four so you have no doubt you've hit the correct gear on those middle positions. The NSX has that, but the sensation is perhaps half to 2/3 what it is on the 997.2. I certainly have no linkage problem on my Porsche. I've had cars with that problem and I'm familiar with the symptoms and general feel. That is not the case with our car and I doubt it is with yours.

Next, engaging the gears. I don't heel and toe around town. It's impossible to do that with reasonable levels of braking. The brake pedal isn't depressed enough in the first place and in the second place a less than full force braking requires more subtle modulation. I at least find it impossible to achieve that smooth standard on the brake pedal while blipping the throttle with some optional part of my foot. I rarely double clutch either. Sometimes I must when caught out of rhythm on a shift, but normally you can match engine speed to the new lower gear without all that hoofarah. And when the speeds match properly, the synchros do very little work. I realize driving crash boxes teaches this faster than modern street transmissions, but you don't have to go take Skip Barber to learn how. Just be conscious of it consistently for a while and you'll get the rhythm of your engine. If people really haven't heard of all this, then I'll talk about it more when I'm not so tired.

Now back to feeling a high resistance to the gears engaging. Certainly I do on occasion. It seems characteristic of this gearbox. It doesn't happen when I'm driving normally as described above, but if something breaks the rhythm and I have to get into first at an awkward speed, and I miss the engine speed match, then yes the gears don't want to engage. Another time it happens is when I've come to a stop without the car in first gear. That is rare for me because many cars object to being put into first gear while at a standstill if you weren't in that gear when you came to a stop. The correct procedure across all cars I've driven is to engage first as you pass the proper vehicle speed for the engine speed at idle. I think someone said eight mph and that's sounds about right. I never looked. You can tell the first few times whether you're doing it too soon or too late because you'll feel the synchros working too hard to engage the gear. When you have it right, the shift will feel like butter, and you'll soon do it automatically at that correct speed. You don't even let the clutch engage. Just shift into first and continue rolling to a stop.

Incidentally, I can't imagine needing to downshift to first in lieu of braking. That's just silly. I do downshift to first occasionally in traffic when I want the lower gear to keep crawling along and then I have to blip the throttle because the gap between the first and second ratios is pretty big on these cars.

So now you have it in first gear before the car stops. That's important. You can take it out of gear now and it won't matter, but if you roll up in neutral the teeth will often align badly inside the box. Then when you try to engage at a standstill with the driveshaft halted, you're asking the synchros to actually turn the gear for you. In older transmissions with no synchros on first, you would get no result at all and it's what you deserve. With these cars, I think you're abusing the transmission to force it in while the teeth are misaligned. If you forgot to engage first while slowing, and you get that heavy resistance, just stop trying first, and pull back on the shifter to touch second gear. Don't engage fully, just touch it. That will move the gears slightly and you'll be able to push forward into first without the resistance.

Overall, try thinking of this another way before you decide you have a problem. Synchros in sedans are for idiots. Ignore that class of car. The synchros on a sports car are to minimize wear on the teeth when you're using the gearbox as it should be used. They are not there to provide comfort for idiots. What they are intended to do is handle the slight mismatch of speeds between the vehicle and the target engine speed in the new gear when you've made a good stab at it and didn't quite do it perfectly.

Quick example because I'm tired tonight and can't proof this properly. An idiot compelled to drive a stick shift approaches a corner. Car goes into neutral, engine drops to idle speed and the car goes around the corner nervously and corrected three times "lest it tip over" and then from twenty mph with the engine still at idle said idiot shoves the shifter in the general direction of first gear let's say. Or second if you prefer. The only thing you can say about that method is that it's not as abusive as doing it at fifty miles an hour. The driveshaft and the engine are as misaligned in speeds as the idiot could manage at twenty. The transmission for an idiot has to have very aggressive synchros that will permit this shift despite the wildly out of match speeds at the engine and the drive shaft. And without a noteworthy graunch, lest it take up dealer time explaining to every idiot who buys one that it is normal behavior.

The transmission on my car will just bloody well refuse to engage in those circumstances, and I say good for it.

That is the occasion I mentioned feeling the symptom you describe. When I was first learning the rhythms of this car and would get out sync myself. I would be trying to grabbing a gear when I hadn't allowed time for the engine speed to match. With a car like this, we shouldn't expect the synchros to handle a mismatch smoothly if it's more than a few hundred rpm. (I can hear the cries of "it's a $100k car for God's sake!" No it isn't. It's a $100k sports car for God's sake. It doesn't have a fold-down picnic table at the back and it doesn't have a transmission designed for the operating style of idiots. I don't believe you can do that while delivering the very high torque from that beautiful engine, not to mention the extremely small space and the weight constraints imposed on every component on this car. I don't mean they are building a weaker transmission that will have reliability problems. On the contrary, I'm saying they had to give on some aspect to meet the performance standards with reliability. What they gave on was convenience, or perhaps I mean an accommodating personality. When I mismatch speeds on a shift, it won't console me and reassure me I'm a good person. It just protects the transmission by refusing to do anything. It balks.

I've never looked into transmission design personally. I would say offhand that the other design demands of a small transmission unit that must pass the high torque of an engine like ours simply do not permit the use of synchro designs that are used in cars for idi... uh, larger cars without space issues that can give the designer a few more cubic inches than Porsche can permit.

With that very real possibility in mind, remember two reasons this transmission will feel different from the ones in Porsches that you've used in the past. First, each new model is handling higher levels of torque than the last, but the space available isn't notably more. The margins that could be used to accommodate mis-operation grow smaller with each generation. Second, this one is built in Japan. At least my example is, and I'll bet that's true across the line. It won't be inferior. Our NSX transmission certainly was not. But it may feel different.

Before you give up and assume the transmission is at fault, first try thinking of it as different, not wrong. Picture the synchros as an aid to protecting the teeth so you don't have to be perfect every shift, but do expect a higher standard of yourself than you would need to drive a Mazda or something like that. This isn't a Formula One car that shoves all that torque through a gearbox the size of a pineapple, but it sure isn't a Mazda either, with twice the space and half the torque to manage.

Try shifting your thinking first and then be as harsh as your new results suggest. When you can hit the speed match on every gear reliably and you're still having a balky transmission, you can take any honest service manager out on a demo drive and persuade him easily.

Gary

 

The best 6 speed manual transmission i drove was Honda S2000 . All the shifts are percise , much better than my 997 C2S.

 

Hey Gary, great post. I do think there are two separate issues with the 997 transmission. One is just that it feels "notchy" as the OP described. You do a great job of describing how the transmission should feel, and that a bit of resistance in the syncros is not a bad thing, and if you drive correctly you shouldn't really feel that much ever, etc. I agree with all that.

However, there is a second issue that some of us have, and it seems you don't have it. I think some of the confusion in this discussion is that some people who don't have the worse problem think "you're just driving wrong" or "it's no big deal" or "all cars are hard to get into 1st gear".

The more severe problem happens only occasionally. More often when cold or after some hard driving. When it does happen it becomes *extremely* hard to get into 1st gear. For example you described :

When my transmission is in its more resistive mode, there is no way I'm getting it into 1st gear while the car is still moving, even below 5 mph, no amount of throttle blip rev matching or coaxing seems to help, it's just locked out. My only hope is to wait for the car to come to a full stop, then do the trick of sliding towards second gently then back to 1st and just coax the stick a bit and it will slide in.

 

I agree completely. That behavior is a problem and I hadn't pictured that from the earlier descriptions.

Gary

 

So, I have a factory SSk in my car. The previous owner/dealer ordered it that way.

1. Going into 2nd sounds and feels scary when the transmission is cold - especially in the cooler weather.
2. According to my commute, i get out of my complex and hit the highway in about half a mile. I stay in the loser lane because the car isn't warm enough to merge into fast traffic - at least that's what i think. I keep the revs below 4k rpm and eventually get to a speed where i shift into 5th gear. Shifting into 5th gear sounds like a grind the first time i do it during a drive.
3. After about 15 minutes of the car having been driven, the transmission shifts like a dream. Even getting into 2nd gear feels rewarding.

Inputs? i am guessing this is normal.

 

I put the SSK in because I thought the OE shifter was too smooth...

I guess I like notchy,

T.

 

I have had 4 911'1 and they have all been notchy going from 1st to 2nd, seems to be inherent.

 

i learn something new everyday.. thx gary !

 

Isn't that a neat trick? I learned it from a Jaguar driver back when we had an MG Midget. Around 1965. Our mutual heritage as sports car drivers!

Gary

 

Not in my experience. I'll have to think about this to have an opinion. What is your climate?

Gary

 

I live in Richmond, Va, These days, the mornings are in the upper 30s to 40s.

 

I went to my Porsche Dealer and requested them to let me drive another similar car as mine - I wanted to drive one without a SSK, and from a cold start.
They said, "Sure, no Problem" Gave me the keys to a car and told me to go satisfy myself. (No Pun Intended).

After driving this car, I so much appreciate my SSK more than i did before. These cars do have different characteristics until all components have warmed up. The second is difficult to engage until the transmission has warmed up.

 

I have about 3K miles on my 997.2 and I do find the shifting to be "clunky" into 1st and 2nd gear much (not all) of the time. How warmed up the car is doesn't seem to make a difference.

By comparison, I've driven a 996.1 and two examples of the 997.1, and the shifting in all three of those was always effortless.

I plan to give my 997.2 more time to hopefully get better. If it doesn't, I'm going to insist that the dealer do something, since I see no reason to accept this knowing that it doesn't have to be this way.

 

I've been thinking about this and tried to stay conscious of the sensations in my first half mile. Our nearest freeway is six miles away and the road between is pretty much wide open, but two-lane, so I never have thought about whether I need to constrain the speed to avoid abusing the car. But I pulled onto the road from our driveway a few days ago, as I remember doing in the past, and realized a car in my mirror was approaching more quickly than I liked. As a result I moved out briskly enough to leave him behind in a clear fashion. Nothing dramatic, just enough to keep the driver from feeling like I "cut him off" or blocked his progress. (Although in fact, he was going a little fast for this section and invited the problem.) I certainly used nothing like the car's potential when warm, but I did go up to 70 or so and kept it there for the half mile to the first stop sign, where I turn east. In that section with several homes, I normally keep it to 50-ish because the car is cold anyway and I don't want my neighbors feeling like they live along a dragstrip. The point is that the incident let me feel the sensations of asking more from the car when it was stone cold.

My conclusions from that week:

• The entry into second certainly does require a precise match of engine speed to road speed to avoid some pretty high resistance. Your SSK will raise the effort level still further compared to my baseline linkage, so I can see where it would feel awkward to the point of suggesting a problem. Getting into first at the stop sign isn't difficult, but I have decades of experience matching speeds in non-synchro first-gear shifts, and it's a reflex by now so my impression won't be typical. (Second gear shifts vary with each engine so they never reach that level of unconscious accomodation.) First surely is stiff as well, since both gears use the same type synchros. This much I think must be considered the real price of a short-shift-kit, not the dollars.
• The increased 'notchiness' already ascribed to the 997.2 transmission is probably related. I looked into adding the OEM short-shift kit to my car and learned that the linkage was changed between the 997.1 and the 997.2. The baseline linkage in the newer cars already provides two-thirds of the effect of the short-shift kit in the older model. I didn't look up the numbers, but ordering a short-shift for the dot two is either giving you just that last third of the effect of an SSK on a dot one, or it is going into realms beyond the dot one with SSK. I don't know which, but neither one seemed worth the thousand-odd dollars, so I never installed one. I'm honestly happy with the feel my dot two has right now and the stiffness in that first half-mile could become annoying -- though admittedly brief -- if I installed an SSK. I suspect the design team sympathized with the popularity of the short-shift kit for the dot one, but experimenting with alternatives led them to choose the leverage given by the current model as being the furthest they could go without creating drivability issues. It's alright to have such mild issues when a buyer chooses an option knowing it has such effects. That's an intentional and presumably knowledgeable trade-off, but it wouldn't do to have a baseline configuration with known effects like that.
• We shouldn't use full power or high rpm when any engine is cold, especially one as highly tuned as ours. But with that said, the slow speeds of an American freeway or even an open desert road don't begin to stress the driveline of a Carrera. In moving away 'briskly' from that other car, I still was shifting at around 4000 rpm. Maybe 4500. And I was using no more than half throttle I suppose. Something like that. If I ever had occasion to enter a race track with the engine truly cold like that, I'd want at least two laps of warm-up, not the usual one lap. Nevertheless, a cold Carrera being coddled still has more performance than 90% of the cars on the road, and fourth gear at 4000 is 70 mph, which may not permit the fast lane in my area, but it would in many places without holding up traffic. If my freeway were that close, I'd be in the slow lane also, but it wouldn't require turning on the flashers.
• I usually warm the engine by shifting no higher than fourth gear myself until the coolant reaches 185F, but not because fifth gear feels or sounds "like a grind." Merely to help the warm-up along and avoid any chance of lugging the engine. Your sensations when attempting fifth gear puzzle me. I've never run into problems that caused effects in a higher gear like fifth that didn't show up in third (for example) unless they were specific to that gearset. And problems like a chipped tooth don't go away with warm-up. At least no example springs to mind. Your description isn't quite enough here. I don't have any sense of it foreshadowing a future problem, but it is worth asking a good mechanic to feel that effect and offer an opinion. That would mean leaving your car overnight and driving a loaner, but that's probably worthwhile, if only for peace of mind. The synchros obviously are different on the higher gears, and the forward moving shifts involve different parts, but I still would say it is not normal to have fifth feel that way. I just can't evaluate it without a drive. (And we're not close enough for me to do that. )

Basically, I wouldn't worry about your second gear, but concerning your fifth gear I haven't any useful ideas either way. I hope this helps,

Gary

 

I agree, Manifold. In fact, I wouldn't wait for it to get better. I'd bug the dealer now. It sounds like the linkage needs adjusting. Very likely no dramatic change is needed, because little changes in a linkage are easily felt by the human hand and a moderate difference in adjustment can go from enjoyable crispness to PITA.

Gary