Just Finished My 410 Gear Install

It's hard to feel improvements sometimes. Sometimes if you do a mod, go for a drive but its 100 degree and humid out and the last time you drove it it was 60 you might not feel a lot of difference. Engines make a range of power that is depended on many things. You are overall faster, just might not have noticed yet.

They definitely feel faster, and with adequate traction at the track, they are faster. Including weather differences, I picked up over 3 mph at the track going from 3.27s to 3.73s recently.

faster at the track but likely not quicker

I also picked up around .1 in worse weather. Correcting for weather, it picked up around .25 seconds.

Of course, this will vary for any given setup. But gears make you faster/quicker for 2 reasons:
1) You can get into your powerband more quickly. On my car, an automatic, I don't have the ability to slip the clutch and start out in that nice powerband like manuals do. I launch at 1500 rpm, and then have to lug through the low RPM until 3000ish where the car really starts making power. Gears get through this range more quickly, maybe half a second faster, which REALLY makes a big difference.

2) It actually makes more average torque on the wheels down the 1/4 mile. See below (this is my car, red is 3.73s, blue is 3.27s)



It's not as much as it feels like because you don't really feel those ranges where it's making less torque. But when you integrate over the entire range until 120 mph, the 3.73s put around 6% more torque on the tires over the entire pass.