Nothing like going for 3rd and having the shifter jam or just simply missing the shift and losing a race, never happens with an automatic. All my early owned GTOs (4) and a 67 326 HO Firebird were my early owned muscle cars and were all 4 speeds. I was assured that you absolutely needed a manual transmission to go real fast, until I bought my 69 GTO (400, T400, 3.23 original gear changed over to 4.33 gears and headers with a solid roller cam, street car).
The 2 cars that really convinced me that I didn't need a 4 speed was when the T300 went south in my 67 Le Mans I put a long tail T400 in it. Around the same time my friends 65 Le Mans T300 took a dump and he wanted a 4 speed in his so we put a BW T10 in it. Both cars were 326 2 bbl cars with 2.56 axles. My car would eat his alive from a roll or a standstill, didn't matter I always won even though he had an extra gear.
All the complaining about not being able to shift either up or down is a lot of BS, I shift my 05 GTO up and down through the gears all the time, but if I don't want to shift it I can just put it in 4th and let it shift by itself. The 04-06 GTOs are proof there isn't any performance loss with an automatic, 0-60 exactly the same times.
My 73 T/A 455 with 71 HO heads and a T400 I built to handle and raced it in the SCCA regional and won C/Prepared for the season with 4 firsts and 2 seconds won the season for the class. Ran against other stick cars and had no problems beating most of them, can't go around corners with an auto or downshift them? BS!!! Anyone here recall Jim Hall the Texan engineer that built and drove the built the infamous Chapparal road race cars during the mid 60s? These cars had T400 derivative manually shifted transmissions in them with 5000 stall converters.
During my manual transmission era I broke more transmissions, clutches, driveshafts, U joints, and rear axles and was spending more money and time under the car instead of driving them.
After I graduated from school I built 2 bubble top 61 Pontiacs for dirt tracks and in the period from 70-73. At that time all oval track cars had sticks in them and so did these cars. I was in partnership with another guy and he ripped me off and we split. I then built my 67 Le Mans in to a 67 Le Mans/GTO clone (picture of #35 in my signature pictures) for the dirt track with the T400 already in it I just transplanted a 400 engine in it. I was kinda in uncharted territory but figured it would work just fine. Won 13 times in 2 years with the combo, nothing bad about the combo. When I moved up a class I built a 69 GP SJ 428 with a T400. I ran the car for 3 years against all stick cars and never was at any disadvantage.
So I've run both types of transmissions in at least 3 different High Performance Pontiac applications, and have won more than my share of events with automatics and see no disadvantages to running an automatic over a stick. Also from 2004-2008 I drove a semi, of course most of the trucks were sticks and I have changed gears too many times to even count. Even with only using the clutch to start out and stop and floating the gears while upshifting and downshifting, I'm really over rowing a transmission through the gears for 12+ hours every day.
One other application I have run both types of transmissions in, a wrecker/snowplow/service truck, I'd take an auto hands down for that application too. That said, I currently own a 88 S1600 IH truck, formerly a U Haul with a 26 foot box on it that I shortened the chassis and have added a wrecker body to it. It has a 5 speed in it, but if it had an Allison in it, it would be fine with me. I'm not going to convert it because I probably see little advantage to spending the money or time to switch it.
I'm going to build 2 more Hi Po street cars in the future and they will both have 4L80E transmissions in them, my preference, and my cars. No advantage to using a manual transmission in these cars, old technology. It's like keeping a points distributor because it came with one originally................
