How Fast Can Supercars Actually Shift? McLaren 720S

Hello everyone and welcome. I am sitting inside of a McLaren 720s and it is very rare that I get opportunities to drive vehicles absolutely this wild so I am super pumped to be in it. I have the car for exactly two hours, maybe a little bit more, and so rather than doing a review which you know is very tempting because this thing is extraordinarily fun, I am sure you have heard if you've watched or read any reviews about the McLaren 720s that it is stupidly quick and it is. It is like numbingly cool, like it's hard to comprehend how fast this is once you're already at 80 miles an hour and then you floor it and then it just keeps going. It is crazy how fast this car is but that's not what I'm trying to figure out. I'm going to do an experiment for the two hours that I have this and hopefully it works. I don't know if it's going to work out so the results may be poor and I'm probably going to post this video either way because again it's rare that I get an opportunity like this so I'm really excited to be in this McLaren 720s and trying something out. So the experiment we are doing is trying to figure out how fast can supercars shift and can we detect how fast they shift. So what I'm going to be using is this vbox sport right here. This is a data logger and so it's monitoring my position. It's got 10 to 12 satellites which will lock on to this. I'm going to place it on the outside of the vehicle so it gets a nice clean signal and then it takes my position every 20th of a second. 20 hertz system in this. So that means it's capable of detecting every 0.05 seconds. So if the car shifts faster than 0.05 seconds I may not be able to see much but if the car takes longer than 0.05 seconds then I will be able to detect it and hopefully I can see a trace. So we're going to be looking at acceleration and so we'll see a trace of what gear it's in based on acceleration. So you know the first gear it'll be a really steep curve and then it'll just kind of start to die off as you get into those taller gears where you're putting down less wheel torque. That's the idea behind it and then my idea is to try and measure you know how many data points does it have for each shift. So can we detect how quickly this thing shifts gears and it has different modes. So I'm going to try different modes and we're going to see what the results are trying out these different modes. They actually do different things with the transmission and with the engine depending on what mode you're in as far as how shifting happens. So first I'm going to start out in comfort mode and that's going to be kind of the easiest shift and so it's going to go for just completely seamless. It's not going to be that abrupt and then I'll get into why after we try this out why sport and track may be a bit harsher of a shift and there's actually a very logical reason that they do it. But as you can see here just looking at this GPS if I move it at all it picks up those tiny little movements. It's very sensitive and then if I stop moving it goes back to zero. So it's a very accurate device. I'll include a link in the video description if you're curious to check this thing out but a pretty neat little device so we're going to see if we can trace these shifts using changes in acceleration. So we are working with a seven speed dual clutch transmission they call it seamless shift gearbox and a four liter twin twin scroll turbo v8 producing 710 horsepower so wildly potent all of that going to the rear wheels open differential they use brakes to control where things are going they say they do that to save weight and complexity pretty crazy in a car that this is you know this modern this wild uh is saying we're gonna we're gonna make it more simple and use an open diff and save some some money and some weight very cool. Okay so let's start our test and we'll see if we can record any shifts at all. Goodness this thing is quick. Okay test one was a failure we're gonna try that again here we go. Unreasonably quick. All right let's have a look and hopefully the gps got that. Okay this is pretty crazy so here we are looking at and I'll put this on the screen so that you guys can see it better than looking at this on my camera but here we can see where I pulled out onto the road and I started to accelerate and then I actually got on the gas and then as you can see it's just a straight line it doesn't really curve over which is what you would expect to see uh you know with a slower vehicle that starts to lose power as you get into the higher speeds and you also don't see any of these little points bunched up together so each one of these little dots is indicating a data point where it recorded my position and you don't see them all bunched up in a certain spot and that would let us know you know where it's actually shifting. So as an example here's a data log of my Honda S2000 of course a manual transmission and you can see these very obvious shifts here where I am obviously shifting gears and so there's no forward torque and you can see you know it takes a decent amount of time for that to happen for me to shift from first to second pretty quick but then from second to third you go over and then up so it takes a little bit longer and you can see those very defined steps there in the curve you can also see that the curve is you know a certain angle and then it goes to a shallower angle and then less and less angle because as you get into those higher gears you're getting less wheel torque and then you look at the curve for the McLaren and as you can see you know I didn't put my foot down until right about here and then it's just a straight line and you have no idea where it shifts and it actually did shift twice on this map so it went into second pretty quickly uh before I had gotten on it and then it stayed in second shifted a third and then fourth and I have no indication of where that happened which is pretty crazy you know I've done this with other automatic transmission vehicles and you can see an indication of where they shift it's not perfect and you know a 20 hertz engine it would be better to be able to measure every 100th of a second rather than every 1 20th of a second but I wasn't expecting it to just be this straight curve I was imagining that I could at least see the curve from the gear shifts so currently I'm not able to tell at all how quickly this thing shifts because it's faster and it's always positive torque and it's faster than I can record which is wild in itself very cool I'm going to try a different mode now I'm going to put it in sport uh you know what I'm going to put it in track we're going to put it in track mode and try that out and what it does here is it does something called inertia push and so it takes the engine and it brings it up to a higher speed than it needs to be for the speed that your wheels are spinning for your transmission and then it slams that clutch really quickly so you get that forward jolt and McLaren says this gives you a little bit of additional acceleration but you also get that really cool jolt you know of a like a sequential shifter where you get that hard you know it bangs in the gear so you get that sensation and they say it gives you a little bit more acceleration to have the engine slightly faster than it should be bring the transmission into it real fast so we're going to try it in track mode and see if we can notice any differences with the GPS all right track mode let's do this wow okay we got two shifts there recorded with full throttle so we should be able to see them if there's enough of a difference in the shifting acceleration captured so let's have a look at that so this is cool it looks like this way you can actually see those shifts so you've got a little bit of a kink right around 50 miles per hour which is when i noticed it did shift the first uh from first to second and then again around about 70 miles per hour where it seemed to shift from second to third so you can see a little kink in there uh zooming in here very hard to tell and you never lose positive acceleration in either case really hardly at all so a very very small difference in the acceleration between these but it is at least noticeable you can see it gets on a different curve this line right here versus this line right here versus this line right here so it's interesting that you can detect the different gears using this GPS you just unfortunately cannot detect at this detail of you know 1 20th of a second how fast it's actually shifting and what's interesting with the shifting in track mode versus the customer or the the C mode the comfort mode rather is that the comfort mode you really don't feel the shift it just keeps accelerating you hear it you know what happened but you don't feel it with that track mode you do actually feel that they kind of over rev the engine a little bit and it kind of slips into that gear and you feel that sensation of it slamming that gear in so that is pretty cool that there's a difference and it looks like you can actually see somewhat of a measurable difference here very cool overall i mean it's it's not the results i was hoping i was hoping i could see a bit more detail and i wasn't sure how this was going to pan out and this is the way it's panned out you know experiments when you've got two hours to test them uh you can't you can only do so much optimization so i'm excited about it i think it's cool to see it what have we learned well you know it's never losing positive torque and it's shifting faster than i can record it shifting which is you know 50 milliseconds so the the transmission is extraordinary the acceleration is extraordinary i have had quite a lot of fun uh just trying this thing out and driving around it is crazy how much attention this car draws uh besides the point though what what i was trying to learn here is how fast do supercars shift i was kind of doubting that they were under 50 milliseconds i had read places that it says they're under 50 milliseconds and that seems really fast to me but according to this data logger and and i do trust the results on it that they do a really great job 10 to 12 satellites out there getting my exact location and measuring that every you know 20th of a second so very cool uh product very cool car here had an absolute blast driving it unfortunately i think i need to figure out a way to measure the shifts at a finer resolution to see you know those actual pinpoint and how long it really takes for this car to shift gears thank you guys so much for watching i appreciate any feedback you'd like to leave below and if you have any questions or comments of course leave those below as well thanks