THE GREAT STICK SHIFT CONUNDRUM

I feel guilty, and a little bit confused. Some of what I’m about to say will go down like a tungsten catamaran. But hear me out.

I’ve just driven a 2020 Porsche 911 Carrera S—now fitted with a seven-speed manual gearbox as a no-cost option—and you can probably predict the gist to be: “The manual transmission is for real drivers. It’s more fun, more engaging, requires more skill, and, really, only wankers drive performance cars with a dual-clutch or some other such automated gearbox doing the work for them. The end.”

This refrain was a lot more reality-based a decade-plus ago, when a sports car equipped with an automatic transmission usually meant a neutered experience with a traditional, torque-converter ’box. Those transmissions might or might not have decided to select the right gear for a given situation, and did it slowly. Enthusiasts’ derision of them made easy sense.

Today, though, modern paddle-shift gearbox performance eclipses what was not long ago state of the art in world-class race cars. Even the Porsche folks who design