Sequential Shifter Direction

[Composites Guy]

So... you're driving along in 2nd gear. You have a conventional sequential shifter at your side. Do you push forward or pull back to get to 3rd gear???

Sorry... I've never been in car with a sequential shifter outside of FSAE, and I've only driven our school's cars. What's on your FSAE car? What's on any road car's that you've driven with sequational shifting?

[MrSwa]

Are we talking in an FSAE car or just a car with sequential shifting? In our car it's forward to go up, and back to go down. That way you can just bump the shifter in acceleration.

[Fyhr]

Generally you would pull back to shift up.

However or some modern cars (Alfa Romeos and such) with "electronical sequential shifters" they messed it all up and forward is up.

Consider this, you are in a really powerful car, you accelerate out of the corner pushing you back into your seat, which configuration is most natural; pushing against the acceleration to shift up or just go with it and pull back? Same thing goes for braking of course, you're hanging in the seat belts, need to shift down before the corner, is it easier to shift down by pushing forward or pulling back?

[kapps]

Bingo. Fyhr hit it on the nose.

(of course, our car was push to upshift and pull to downshift but that was due to packaging constraints)

[Mike Hart]

As Fyhr said. Back to go up, forward to go down. Completely unnatural to me to go in the opposite direction against the forces in the car.

[MikeDutsa]

Back is up, forward down. like mike said, any thing else is just weird. I drove a BMW one time that was oppisite, i was miss shifting all over the place, completely un-intuitive.