Does anyone have advice on driving the tiptronic in manual? I am intereseted to learn more about it and was considering checking out a driving school. I recently purchased an '05 997 Cab and love it as a daily drive. I have not been a sports car enthusiast in the past so I'm quite a novice when it comes to this and could use some experienced pointers. Thanks!

 

I have had mine for three years and usually leave it in auto mode. I use manual only when I want to hold a gear or just let it rev a little higher for response or sound.

My advice would be to drive it for a week in only manual mode to get to know how it reacts instinctively -- you'll adapt to how it holds gears, when you want to shift, etc. A key for me is learning that you can't double tap the shift buttons and get it to double downshift -- the car requires a bit of time between each operation of a button before it will interpret them as "he wants to downshift two gears" or "he wants to go from 3rd to 5th directly (it won't).

Also, there was an article in Road and Track or Car and Driver within the last five years on driving a Tip that was illuminating to me. It had a lot of good advice and made a point about using the throttle kick downshift when in auto mode: you can force the trans to downshift with a sharp tap on the throttle, so fast that the engine itself doesn't react. If you mash the throttle of course the trans obviously downshifts-- but learn to do a fast tap (down on the the throttle about 1/2 way and let up again in 1/5th second or so) can downshift with your foot without distrubing the engine, and I've learned to downshift it from 5th (in auto mode) to 3rd even, something I can't get it to do as fast by double-tapping the wheel buttons -- it took me a long time to get the hang of it and I have to practice it every so often or I am not good at it. It helps alot when you don't want to move a hand to the shift bottons on the wheel.