Quote Originally Posted by shinn497 View Post
300 torque is 300 torque regardless of how much resistance is being imparted to it. Resistance effects acceleration not force. The car will accelerate faster and spins the tires often, but I'm worried more about torque spikes. Of course I'm not entirely sure how parts fail, is it a progressive thing, an instantaneous thing, or some combination of both?

Anyway, I think the 5mt will handle higher hps just fine, but I don't think that the lightweight is an excuse to drive like a moron with a 500 whp engine.
Oh god, didn't we talk about this already? F=MA is for rocketships that make the same force regardless of speed. A car running at redline in 1st gear CANNOT ACCELERATE MORE AND THEREFORE CANNOT APPLY ADDITIONAL FORCE. An internal combustion engine also must be under load to create it's maximum torque as the torque is being created by fuel burning under compression. Remove the flame crompression from the system and you loose torque at the flywheel as the mixture expands too quickly but it's a balance as you gain applied torque through the mechanical advantage of the gears down low. Most WRX's won't make peak torque on a dyno until 3rd gear or higher. Race engines like in F1 say f-torque, I'm going to rev to darn near 20k rpm and just make insane amounts of HP and apply a smaller amount of torque more often.

Back on topic: I know guys with 350 whp bugeyes with over 200k on the clock on the stock transmission. I also know guys who've replaced their 5mt 3 and 4 times.

The difference? Launching. In Japan where the WRX has been around since the 90's, transmission failures were so rare that subaru never changed the 5mt's gears for close to a decade and Japanese market drivers are even more power mod crazy than we are.

Then in '02, Subaru brought the WRX to the US market and transmission failures started happening all the time. By 05, they had revised the strength of the 5mt gears several times in an attempt to prevent the failures they were having to cover under warranty for unmodded wrx's.

If that tells you anything, it's how us 'merican drivers with our drag racing heritage drive our cars. We love torque and stoplight to stoplight racing and destroy transmissions more than any other market. The 5mt can handle however much power you decide to drive responsibly with or as little you decide to grenate by not properly engaging the clutch.

That being said, if you have an 05 or later wrx, chances are the gears will be beefy enough to handle some abuse with higher than stock output levels. Otherwise, just be careful not to repeatedly shock-load the transmission by revving to 5k and side-stepping the clutch.

Can we monitor these threads? There are far too many "how strong is the transmission threads". Maybe an admin can sticky a post linking to all of the existing ones or something.