RaceRoom has probably the best H-Pattern gearboxes on the market, with proper representation of dogboxes and the ability to clutchless shift cars at the proper revs, and a nice varied representation per car. I am a huge fan of this. But that's why it's surprising to me that the sequential gearboxes all contain auto-blip and auto-clutch even when they absolutely shouldn't. The Super Touring cars are one of the prime examples of cars with manual transmissions which should require throttle blip to drive quickly - as the real cars had all electronic assists banned. In my personal opinion the manual physics of cars in this game is way too good not to represent this on manual sequential dogboxes as well. People who want auto-clutch and auto-blip can still enable these in the settings and drive the cars as they already do, while those of us who want the full manual experience should be able to have this in my opinion.
enabling downshift protection only on cars that really have this feature would be good and not so complicated (I assume) start cause current implementation of this is just weird
To provide a more comprehensive understanding of what the super touring cars were (and were not) allowed I looked through some of the Appendix J from the year 1995 to the year 2000. They were expressly prohibited semi-automatic and automatic gearboxes. The FIA defined a semi-automatic gearbox (in 1996, the 1995 appendix had no listed definition) as: "One which, when the driver calls for a gear change, takes over the control of one or more of the engine, clutch and gear selectors momentarily to enable the gear to be engaged." The regulation on Super Touring gearboxes specifically says: "The clutch and its control are free but automatic operation of the clutch is not allowed and. in the case of a hydraulic clutch, the liquid tank must not be situated in the cockpit. The clutch must be activated by the driver's feet. Automatic declutching devices in the event of over-reving are permitted, if these devices have no other functions, if the declutching occurs at an engine speed higher than that foreseen by the limiter and if it is homologated (2 500 units)... ...Semi-automatic and automatic gearboxes are forbidden" Basically they did have over-rev protection on downshifts by allowing a device to de-clutch the car if the rev limiter (7200rpm) was exceeded but indeed no form of downshift protection was otherwise allowed.In 1998 they added this stipulation: "It is permitted to have a sensor on the gear lever to initiate a power cut, to have a single, unique timed cut to rail the gears in the ECU and to have a sensor in the gear box to indicate the successful selection of the gear." So from 1998 onwards the cars did cut the throttle on upshifts on their own, but this was the maximum amount of electronic assist that these cars were ever allowed in their working life. It is unclear if this throttle cut was expressly forbidden prior to 1998, but footage of BTCC and STCC from those periods show drivers manually releasing throttle on some cars. Possible it varied from car-to-car. Any sort of automatic engagement of the clutch or electronically blipping the throttle to rev-match on downshifts was expressly disallowed.