My favourite manual gearbox | Thank Frankel it's Friday

Now I’d love to say this was some whizz-bang 300bhp Golf R, but it’s not: it’s a five-year-old defiantly mid-range model with a 130bhp, 1.5-litre motor and the most basic trim level to include the all-important multi-link rear axle. I’ve driven limos that can’t hold a candle to my Golf when it comes to ride quality, but that’s another story.

That car’s gearbox is astonishingly good and, like so much of the car, wildly better than it has any need to be. The shift quality is so clean you’d think the other end of the gear lever was not connected to anything, were it not for the fact it is also so precise you need barely do more than think it into the next ratio. So it got me thinking about great gearboxes, by which I don’t necessarily mean the most clinically capable, but those with the most character. A gearbox with character? You had better believe it.

Take the dog-leg five-speed box Ferrari used for its mid-engine sports cars from the Dino and up to (but not including) the 348. In many ways, it actually wasn’t a very good box at all, and it was severely flawed, with weak synchromesh on second gear. So you learned very quickly simply to not use that gear until the needle of the oil temperature gauge was off its stop. 

It would always take far longer than you expected but only then was second safe to engage, not that it was much hardship before that point because the need to go from first to third when pulling away showed how beautifully engineered those Ferrari engines were: highly tuned motors that would nevertheless accept without a murmur the third of their five ratios at little more than walking pace. And once the oil was warm, the scrape and scratch of the lever as it found its way around its exposed gate was as much part of the Ferrari experience as the look of its body or the sound of its engine.

Similar tributes can be made about the gearbox in the humble first-generation Mazda MX-5. A car renowned for its superb handling, in fact, half the fun was rifling up and down the box, and much can be said about the Peugeot 205GTI.

But what I really like is a gearbox that’s a proper challenge, and I’ve driven a few. Some are just plain terrifying because they have a really weird layout that just invites you to select the wrong cog. The worst offenders I’ve known were old Mercedes racing cars. Two I’ve driven really stand out: the 1939 W165 Tripoli Grand Prix winner and the 1955 300SLR ‘Uhlenhaut Coupe’. 

Both have five-speed boxes with first and fifth where you’d find them in a Ford Fiesta. No problem. Except that second is directly below third and fourth directly below fifth, not across the gate like the Fiesta. So imagine you’re in fifth and want to change down to fourth: do it the conventional way by coming back across the gate and you get second, with catastrophic consequences. Likewise, pull straight back to change from third to fourth as you usually would and that also gives you second. 

I loathe pre-selector boxes too: I’ve raced an MG K3 at Goodwood and the requirement to select third gear while honking down the straight towards Woodcote just doesn’t compute in my small brain.

Strangely however having pedals around the wrong way doesn’t trouble me, nor do most gearboxes that lack synchromesh. Probably the single best change I have ever experienced is from second to third in a vintage 3-litre or 41/2-litre Bentley fitted with the close ratio ‘A’ or ‘D’ box. The limiting fact is how fast you move your hand and pump your left leg twice.

But if I had to name my favourite gearbox of all, it would be that fitted to the pre-war Aston Martin sports cars I’ve been lucky enough to drive. These cars have centre throttles, no synchro and a backwards layout where third and fourth are to the left of first and second, but because the little 1.5-litre engine has so little inertia and the gearbox is so beautifully engineered the lever slices its way around the gate like the proverbial knife through butter. Mastering that to the point you can execute lightning-fast, silent changes all the way and back down the box is, to me, one of the finer forms of automotive nirvana.