[Paco]

Well, just for 'straight burning' you could do with an auto perhaps. The more powerful a car gets, the more proficient you'd have to be to put in a fast sprint time. You can lose a LOT of time with bad shifting. Personally, I think a manual is much more fun and since you're buying this car for fun...

Just a quick out-of-my-head pop-quiz on some of the things I named (people, feel free to elaborate):
rev-matching: when going back a gear or 2, you hit the accellerator when you have the clutch pedal in (thus increasing the revs) and then you release the clutch in the lower gear. By doing this, you prevent rev-loss so that your engine doesn't find itself below the 'rev-sweet-spot' (where you have the most torque available to you). In other words: you compensate for the low revs by revving it while applying the clutch pedal.
It also prevents your drive train having to take a beating from the sudden rev difference.

Also, it can prevent the aforementionned shift-lock, where the drive train locks up because the engine cannot handle the sudden high revs. This means you are too high in revs and the limiter or differential could protest, or worse a blown engine/gear box.

Short shifting is nothing more than shifting up well before the ideal shifting point (high revs) when you encounter a long corner. If you would enter the corner in the highest torque-area (the sweet spot) you could get into trouble when aplying the accellerator too violently. The sudden burst of torque could cause dangerous over- or understeer or a waggling tale end. Experienced drivers prefer a more gradual feed of torque over a longer stretch and will therefor use a higher gear (and lower revs) so that they can keep accellerating throughout the long curve.

Clutch dumping is something you see a lot in those Japanese drift movies: in a (tight) corner they slightly dump their clutch pedal to increase the revs while staying in the same gear. Not the best thing for your car and you can easily cook your clutch like that. Again, high revs are the sought-after thing.


Don't forget, that shifting technique in cars with N/A engines is a bit different from cars with turbo engines. The latter have a much narrower powerband than the usually higher revving N/A engined cars.