Interesting to think, but this has yet to be addressed: When do you guys shift your car at the strip? It would be extra special if you could post a dyno sheet with your power curve so that we could perhaps look for patterns? I'm gonna fulfill a promise and take my car out, but I've yet to ever do so, so I'm looking for pointers. Thanks!

Oh yeah, when I do get dyno sheets, they'll be up so I can contribute some to the power curve-to-ET talk.

 

What you need is an accelerometer (sp?). Something like the g-tech pro. The key thing is where do you find the car accellerating the quickest for a gear/MPH. Meaning at what point does the accelleration vs MPH do the gear lines cross.

Plot the acceleration on the Y axis and the speed along the X axis. You'll have 6 lines, each representing a gear. Set the accelerometer to read speed vs. accelleration and do a 3k rpm to redline pull in each gear. You see a hump shaped curve for each gear. You can see the acceleration of acceleration (yes, where the line slopes up as you start to approach peak torque), then at peak torque the line will flatten out (you're still accelerating, but just not accelerating the acceleration). Just past peak torque you'll start seeing a deceleration of acceleration (however you'll be accelerating, but just not accelerating as quickly) where the line starts to slope down. Then overlay each of the six plots and you can see at what MPH your particular car will need to be shifted at. This is the point where the next higher gear is actually accelerating harder than the previous gear.

Note: In some older cars the gear spacing is so great that the acceleration lines never do cross and hence why you hear old-timers talking about shifting at redline to get the quickest pass down the strip.

You'll need to do this for your car as it is currently modded. Remember how some mods get you more torque down low and others get you better top end?

Remeber, you're looking for maintaining the highest level of acceleration and shifting gears when the next gear will pull harder than the previous.

Back in 2002 I thought I had seen one of these graphs for the MCS. But after 20 minutes of searching forums I can't find it. I do remember the 2nd gear to 3rd gear MPH shift point being 62 (even though you can go over 70MPH at redline in 2nd)

 

Here's an graph for a VW GTI I found on the ross-tech site that shows acceleration vs. MPH per gear.