</font><font color="blue" class="small">( why would you prefer a manual over an automatic for a 'high speed" pursuit? )</font>
Doyle, once again it may just be personal preference, and of course, remember that I was a city cop, so most high speed pursuits involved lots of turning, not straight line running like you'd have on the highways. Example: The first one I ran was about 2 a.m. in the morning, only covered 4 miles in 6 minutes, 14 turns, ran 10 stop signs, 5 red lights, about 6 blocks the wrong way on a one-way street, through a shopping center parking lot where he jumped curbs, went down sidewalks, and back onto the street, and he turned his lights off for several blocks in a dark area in an attempt to lose me. And I was driving a 1965 Ford with a 289 V-8, manual transmission. Now he was on a motorcyle, had a lot more power and could have easily outrun me in a straight line, and he later claimed to have won some state championship motorcycle races and always thought a motorcycle could outrun a car, but by keeping my RPMs up, running almost entirely in 1st and 2nd, I stayed right with him until he misjudged his angle on jumping another curb and fell. He also said later that about half way through the chase, he wanted to give up, but was afraid I'd run over him if he stopped. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif And in spite of pushing that hard, my brakes never overheated or faded (didn't have disk brakes back then, either).
When we went to larger engines, automatic transmissions (less engine braking), power steering, and power disk brakes, I've had brakes get hot enough to fade to the point of being almost completely useless. Admittedly, it was because the car manufacturer used the wrong kind of material for disk brake pads, and after a letter I wrote, they replaced all the disk pads on our entire fleet.
Now with modern equipment, I might change my mind about preferring the manual transmission, but basically I liked having better control of my RPMs and the engine braking of manual transmissions, but only for such high speed, competitive operations which I never intend to be involved in again. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif I've only had a little bit of experience on a race track, but I can assure you it's not exciting at all compared to high speed chases on the streets. I think most young cops kind of look forward to high speed chases, but after they've done it a couple of times, they hope they never have to do it again. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif Even if they are as lucky and I was and never involved in an accident during one. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
