Low Power Winning – Gear Ratios 2

At 3AM when Hinata-chan is balling, and I can’t justify a trip to the garage, I started playing GT4 again.  Driving simulator games, especially GT4, are sweet and lame at the same time.  Sweet in that they’ve helped me think a lot about real driving when I haven’t in a long time, but lame in that, the time I have spent playing seems entirely wasteful, and I’d much rather have spent the time wrenching or… turning the wheel.

But my mission since I re-started playing GT4 has been to go as far as possible with an NA AE86.  In the end, it hasn’t been that far, but I’ll say… that I’ve been able to go a lot further than initial impressions gave, and it’s all a result of spending time tuning gear ratios for particular tracks.  The difference has actually been spectacular, and it’s lead me to think more seriously about real life gear ratios and what can be done about them.

So I put together a simple excel spreadsheet to help me examine things.

Here is a look at how the normal T50 works with 4.3 gears and 195/60 14 rubber.  Shifting at 7500 rpm we get a 3300rpm drop when shifting into second, a 2350 rpm drop into 3rd, 2100 into 4th and a wonderful 1050 rpm drop into fifth.

The T50 unfortunately, never got much love from Toyota.  The rumour was that various versions of it had slightly different gearing, but I haven’t found any evidence to back that up.  Toyota seems to have made the T50 and left it be.  In fact, the 4 speed T40 uses the exact same ratios for it’s gears as the T50 uses for it lower four.

TRD however, came up with a full gear set for it, and it looks like this on the chart.

Note that this is the 5 close set which replaces gears 1, 2, 3 and 5.  The 3 close set leaves the normal 5th gear which as we saw in the first chart, is not really a bad thing.  The 5 close however, gives us RPM drops of 2350rpm, 1900rpm, 1200rpm and 850rpm while shifting at 7500.  That could allow for a fairly narrow powerband to flourish, and in addition to that, you’ll notice that first gear is actually usable now: hitting 83km/hr at redline.

The TRD gearsets though… are sick dollars.  I’m not going to be buying one soon.  And so… I took some time and tried to establish some cheap alternatives.  I think I actually have a good lead.  I’ll explain more later… but here is where I’m at so far…. obviously flawed and needing some resolution, but this is with gears available at the local pick n’ pull!

Obviously it’s not T50 but… it’s just as available and quite easy to fit to an A or T motor.