What's this about auto trannys in Formula 1?

[Jared]

I was watching a bit of some F1 race on Speedvision tonight, and they mentioned that at the Barcelona race next week someone is going to introduce traction control and automatic transmissions... is it just one team that is doing this, or are a lot of them going to switch? I don't follow F1 much but this caught my attention

[arskiker]

The tranny's are pretty much already automatic. I think the gears change in less than 1 hundreth of a second.

The thing with traction control is many teams have been cheating for years using traction control systems burried in their programming. This new rule just evens the playing field so to speak. I believe that Bennetton and Ferrari have been rumored of "consistantly" having perfect starts.

[OutaFocus]

Actually, it's a return to auto transmissions previously banned in the early 90's. The transmissions themselves are still the manual boxes they currently use but with electronic and hydraulic, computer controlled shifting. These things got so out of hand before that McLaren had a sensor in the side pod that would take updates every lap from the computers in the garage. The trans computer had a program that told it what gear to be in for every corner on the track. It knew when to upshift and downshift. The program would be modified every time the car passed the sensor to compensatew for changing car performance and track conditions. If the driver spun, or had problems, he would depress a button on the wheel that would allow him to shift manually until he passed the pits and got a new program update. Then he was back to automatic. Amazing technology, but it took a lot of the skill out of it, in my opinion.