Rick posted a thread (here) about lowering the rear gear ratios, and here about his driving impressions of it. The thread piggybacks one by xviper (here).

My question/concern is how will these gears affect racetrack lap times? I mean, if the gears aren't as tall then one would expect to shift more often, which should mean greater acceleration right? However, the time gained by quicker acceleration would be mitigated by the time lost in shifting more often, wouldn't it? And what of the time lost in unsettling the car due to increased torque when the clutch engages while upshifting?

So I'm speculating that times through tight chicanes and turns connected by very short straights would be faster, but time might be sacrificed on longer straights. Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

By lowering your final drive, you effectively drop the speed in each gear. That means that a 2nd gear corner can become a third gear corner. So a corner that you used to be able to power out of in VTEC might now be a slow third gear affair as 2nd might be too slow for the corner. That's the concept that sometimes gets lost when considering gear ratios.

Other than the above example (and of course as long as the terminal velocity of the car doesn't dip below the track's maximum speed) lowering the final drive is generally a good thing. The change in gear ratio should be aggressive enough to make a mid-upper 2nd gear corner into a solid mid-3rd gear corner. At Laguna, for example... turns 2 and 11 would become 3rd gear corners, and you would need 5th gear leading up to each of them.

The best way to approach it is to know that a gear change that works for one track might make the car terrible for the next track. It's just as everything else you can adjust to make a car faster - full of compromises. What you make up here you generally give away somewhere else. Just keep that in mind when making the decision.

 

There was a long thread about this in the UTH forum. The answer is it all depends.. here is a post from there:

[QUOTE]Originally posted by cdelena
[B]

I agree that it is not a straight forward decision for road course work. On many tracks it will increase the number of shifts and that is not a good thing. But if you have a course and speed where it is the opposite so you could stay in a higher gear more, I can see where it would be faster. So both course and driver skill would determine weather it is really and aid to faster lap times.

 

Yes, it really is a track by track deal and generalizations don't really help.

But in general, I would rather have 4.44 gears over 4.11 gears.