ncpbmw1953
Member
There's a happy middle ground, though I was mildly barbecued for this heresy on another thread as I was falsely accused of not appreciating the differences enough. I ordered my '16 w/o SAP on the grounds I didn't want to spend the $500 for it considering how easy clutch operation is on RTLC--considerably easier than the former F800GT I owned. From reading all of the accolades it gets, and it has a lot of fans for sure, what I read is most folks don't use it from 1st>2nd>3rd gears.
So let's say you need to get up to warp speed in a hurry, for example you have a very short freeway onramp and would like to get to 70mph+ real quick. By the time you and the guy w/ SAP start to merge onto the freeway you're probably in both in 3rd gear and likely both got there using the clutch, all the way up 70mph with no need to upshift to 4th at that speed. You could, but you don't need to. You're barely in the power band going 70mph in 3rd gear anyway. What I've done because it's easy, I'm good at it, it's really fast and once you get the timing down is completely smooth, is just shift quickly w/o the clutch. I do this always from 4th to 5th and 5th to 6th now, and occasionally from 3rd-4th but it's a little harder to get perfect so I don't usually do clutchless there. If you haven't done this before, it's a micro-rolloff while putting subtle preload on the shifter, and shifting timed w/ the micro-rolloff. The preload isn't really needed but is if you want to do super fast upshifts.
Downshifts you can't do smoothy like you can w/ SAP, but I enjoy matching revs to anyway and I suppose if you're trying to get thru curves at track speeds it would be a little easier to get you to the right gear for the back half of the turn. But for bread and butter decelerations, downshifting w/ the clutch and rev matching is easy to do and fun to do perfectly.
Or if you think you have to have it you can pay to have it retrofit for $700.
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