Quote:
Originally Posted by madfast
no its not. when you have the wheel fully turned, you cannot hit the paddle to upshift if you want to. its that simple. if you've spent enough time behind the wheel of a paddle shift car, this will eventually happen to you. sometimes you want to manually shift, but at the same time not drive like a street racer.
its not a contradiction. i want to choose my own gears, but if you have wheel mounted paddles, some instances will come up where you cant access them if you're turning the wheel. with column mounted paddles, i always know where they are.
and yes you can say buy a stick or leave it in auto or use the console shifter... but that still doesnt solve the problem that i presented. with column mounted paddles, there is no problem...
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For this I did an observation in daily driving scenarios. In parking lot driving and low speed turn, you do need to turn your wheel 1/2 to a full circle. In those situations, if you need to shift using paddle, with a wheel-mounted paddle it is difficult to do so, especially if you shuffle your hand for turning. On the other hand, having a column-mounted paddle you will have no problem.
E.g. in a community starting from dead stop to make a right turn, you will need to turn the wheel 1/2 to 1 full circle and you do need to shift from 1st to 2nd gear.
However, in a track or winding roads where you only need to turn < 1/2 circle in either direction, having a wheel mounted paddle will help you since you can always keep your hands at 3-9 o'clock location. And I think this is where Tsuchiya san's comment came to effect. And this is proven by the way F1 cars are using the wheel mounted paddles.
IMHO, for street car, column mounted paddles seem to have less problems compared with wheel mounted paddles, but for race-oriented cars wheel mounted paddles seems to be better suited.