well this was a newer neon thats all i know and i'm sure it had less miles on itthen my car because i have 160kmi on my car and it really needs a tune. if i had a 5spd. i might have been able to make the gap a little bigger but it seemed like the guy in the neon has been racing longer then me, after hearing his exhaust as he went through the gears it seemed like he had it pretty well figured out how get the most out of that little 4cyl. all i can say is nice kill on that neonyou raced. maybe my car'll be that pepy again some day.

 

while we're talking about killing neons, i killed my cousins, i think its an 06, from a stoplight. got up to like 65 or so...nothin major. it was fun though

 

05 was the last model year. Auto = 17.3 second car. Manual, 16.1. Allmost recent camaros should beat all (non SRT-4) neons in stock form.

 

The non turbo 300ZX is a good race for a 3.8 Camaro. I raced one of the same type, cept I'm auto and he is manual, and he shifted pretty good. It's been the closest race I've had. Don't know how many miles he had on the thing but I had around 95,000 at the time. From a dig we were pretty much dead even to about 55 when we shut down. He jumped out in front by a couple feet, in his 1st to 2nd shift I got that couple of feet back and from therewe stayed right beside each other.

 

the car gains a second in the quarter with the manual? damn.... dodge needs to invest som R&D into auto trannies [&:]. that is **** poor

 

An econobox like a neon with an auto isn't really designed to be fast. They did the R&D plenty, and found that it appeals to grandmas and non-enthusiast college kids as intended. They made the SRT model to be fast, and the SXT to be cheap and comfy. They succeeded in both.

NVH was a bigger factor in the engineering than performance. So they did precisely what they wanted to do. Sure, it sucks for people like me, but minivans weren't designed for me either.

 

yea, mine had 136kmi at the time, and his is a 02 with bout 30kmi. im also standrad tho, and he's auto. and even tho the guy i bought my car from it was stock(he owned since he bought it, and clean title, but the guy is a car ditz), i KNOW it wasnt. i maxed out in 5th gear bout 95/100MPH so im guessing it had 4.10s, or least 3.73s, and it also had a alluminum driveshaft, and the clutch was very solid, more solid than my dad's 13kmi vette, and the guy he never had clutch work done, CAI, and a glasspack(nothing special, but better than stock)

this guy i bought it from... never changed the brakes... but he told us he had them rotated every month... tells you something...people are idiots[>:]

 

long story short. i know my car was messed with. but no way it was messed with by the guy i bought it off from, he didnt know ****, but i cant figure out who coulda messed with it, cuz he was only owner on carfax when i bought it. and it wasnt a rebuild, cuz was clean title.

 

power loss relates directly to efficiency. the "sportiness" of a tranny has more to do with its shift points and shift firmness, but the loss of a whole second translates into inefficiency across the entire power band, meaning even when the converter is fully "engaged" (because TCs dont really engage persay). I wasnt aware that the srt even came in auto, so is that comparison even relevant? this is the sxt auto vs sxt manual. Ill agree that they did exactly what they wanted to do, but the tranny still wasnt built for comfort, it was built to be cheap. the only way to keep something cheap in an econobox is to not spend alot of money developing it.

 

Actually, the loss of the second is typically in the launch and slightly after. Shift point is 6k, so they could have milked a little more power by stretching that to 6500 or so, but they are dogs off the line for the most part. Soft launch makes the car feel more luxurious. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the torque converter doesn't lock up in any gear except for 4th (4 speed auto) as to keep the power onset smooth. That way the idiot driving can just mash the pedal at a right turn after stopping, and it's not transferring enough power to peel the tires and put them in the oncoming traffic. (example... of course, there's many situations that it helps an oblivious driver to be buffered from the car's response.)

No, the SRTs never came with an auto. I was just using them as an example of a similar car designed with different goals and target markets in mind.

My point is that yes, it's slower, but what they would have had to sacrifice to make it faster is NVH, and their target markets for the car care more about NVH than performance.