Hi Folks,
I hear pretty frequently about people who short shift the N54 because it runs out of steam at the higher RPMs and the power band drops off. When you look at a dyno, I can totally understand why you might think short shifting would get you faster times. But what really matters is the power that makes it to the ground and I think we might be forgetting about the multiplicative impact of gearing.
I pulled a stock dyno graph from Automobile magazines N54 dyno and plotted that by each gear (manual transmission with a 3.08 final drive). If you really were better off short shifting, you would expect to see a higher gear produce more power at the wheels than a lower gear (e.g. 4th gear putting more power to the ground than 3rd gear at higher RPMs). But this isn't the case when you figure in the multiplication of the gearing.
![Click here to enlarge]()
You could potentially argue that there may be a point between 6500RPMs and 7000RPMs in 4th that it may make sense to shift to 5th (depending on where the RPMs fall when you shift), and same for 5th to 6th, but I think the differences are probably so minor that they aren't worth the effort.
What do you all think - am I off in the weeds? Or are we all losing time by short shifting?
-Rich
I hear pretty frequently about people who short shift the N54 because it runs out of steam at the higher RPMs and the power band drops off. When you look at a dyno, I can totally understand why you might think short shifting would get you faster times. But what really matters is the power that makes it to the ground and I think we might be forgetting about the multiplicative impact of gearing.
I pulled a stock dyno graph from Automobile magazines N54 dyno and plotted that by each gear (manual transmission with a 3.08 final drive). If you really were better off short shifting, you would expect to see a higher gear produce more power at the wheels than a lower gear (e.g. 4th gear putting more power to the ground than 3rd gear at higher RPMs). But this isn't the case when you figure in the multiplication of the gearing.
You could potentially argue that there may be a point between 6500RPMs and 7000RPMs in 4th that it may make sense to shift to 5th (depending on where the RPMs fall when you shift), and same for 5th to 6th, but I think the differences are probably so minor that they aren't worth the effort.
What do you all think - am I off in the weeds? Or are we all losing time by short shifting?
-Rich