No doubt nothing more than a goof as you say and in all honesty, I'd have to watch it again to pick up on that. It's not something I'd noticed before.
But goof aside, I like to think that the Driver is so in tune with his machine that he knows when to shift on engine note alone.
Back around a million years ago when I first started driving, something like 90% of people learned in car with a manual shift and a clutch pedal. I know auto is king in the U.S, but here in the U.K it's very much the other way around. Autos aren't exactly rocking horse crap rare here, but the vast majority of cars on the roads in the U.K are manual.
Back when I was a kid (and more so now too), insurance was phenomenally expensive! Anything that had more than 100bhp would set you back thousands of pounds more than the actual value of the car itself. Naturally, this meant first cars for most people here were small capacity 4 pot engines. I know that I had my eye on a Mk.I VW Golf (Rabbit) GTi...probably 120bhp max. The car would have cost about 2 grand to buy, but the best insurance quote was something like 15,000 quid! The irony now is that now I can get old bastard rates for insurance, it would cost at least £15,000 to get a mint Mk.I GTi now and much, much less than 2 grand to insure it!!
I digress.
The point is that to get around insurance issues then, small basic cars were very much the order of the day...but like all young blokes, we thrashed the living daylights out of them! I know my first car, a 998cc Mini Clubman (with the engine from an MG Turbo Maestro I might add...might have forgotten to declare that to the insurance company!!) didn't have tacho. Infact, most small, basic first cars here then didn't have a tacho...Smiths gauges. The fewer of those you had, the better. Reliable they were not!
but we still crashed cars, rolled cars, span 180 degrees, we span wheels and melted tyres, we yanked at handbrakes with far too much enthusiasm. We'd dump clutches like they were made out of carbonite, do clutchless shifting and pointless double de-clutching because the throttle blip sounded cool and J-turns for fun. But we never blew engines....and as great as we thought we were, we were terrible drivers!
Like you said at the end of your post, if you're used to a manual box, even when you're giving it the beans, shifting on sound alone is simple enough. Now, I do a spot of very amateur level track racing these days and know that hooning around on the road and the attention to detail when it comes to the track are light years apart. Racing wise, I know I would certainly struggle to finish a race with a respectable result without an RPM readout. I use it more for cornering and knowing when it'll break traction on the corner out under acceleration rather than straight line acceleration, but then the circuit isn't the strip. You can get away with a sloppy shift on the circuit with a string of nice corners, but on the strip it'll kill you dead in the water.
But this is The Driver we're talking about. I like to think that he's just got that raw natural talent that gives the legends that edge. They can drive around the problems that their cars might throw at them and still win the race.
SEX - Breakfast Of Champions!
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