Manual showdown: BMW M2 vs Honda Civic Type R vs Mazda MX-5

We are off script already and have only just started. This was supposed to be a simple test of manual gearboxes.

Then BMW launched the new ‘G87 ’ M2 coupé, now the only M car you can buy with a manual gearbox and quite an exciting prospect.

So we arranged a little get-together with two of the greatest compact, affordable, manual-equipped driver’s cars of recent times: the perennially just-updated Mazda MX-5, and the previous-generation Honda Civic Type R.

Which has the sweetest shift? In which is the act of first-hand cog swapping most enticing? I didn’t realise that those two questions might have different answers but, having driven these three cars extensively, I’m now convinced that they can. Or, rather, they could.

Why are manual gearboxes so good, anyway?

It’s impossible, you see, to disconnect the ‘what’ from the ‘why’ where manual cars are concerned: the tactile quality and mechanical satisfaction of the action of gearlever and clutch pedal themselves, with the impetus and occasion given to you by the wider driving experience to operate them in the first place. They are inseparable.

A great manual gearbox is like the all-important continuity midfielder on a football pitch, or some eminent business networking specialist. It brings things together, makes them gel and enables their greatest qualities.

These three cars have a varied assortment of dynamic strengths that make them special, memorable and rewarding, each in different ways. But it’s the way that each of their gearboxes connects you to those various strengths, bringing them together like some virtuoso orchestra conductor into a harmonious driving experience, that we are interested in today.

This isn’t just about shift quality, because that would be spectacularly missing the point. This is about what a great manual gearbox can do, rather than simply how it feels.

And, even in 2023, three pedals and a stick-shifter can still do an awful lot. The Autocar readership doesn’t need telling.

So how great it is to see BMW’s M division following the likes of Porsche, Honda, Mazda, Ford and Hyundai in acknowledging that there is still a place for manual gearboxes in the combustion-engined sports cars of the present.

When given the choice, customers so often buy automatics, which are generally quicker and do better on lab test emissions and economy. We know. So what? Driver’s cars are for driving.

A good dual-clutch automatic may be easier to get a fast lap time from. It may even better integrate with a modern torque-vectoring four-wheel drive system.

But if your aim is to make me feel like an absolutely central part of what’s going on around me, there can be no better place to start than by giving me total control of exactly when – and how – the engine is connected to the driven axle.

Gear selection, shift timing, engine revs, speed and style of clutch actuation: just let me do it all myself – and for real please, not through a button and some paddle shifters.

The manual-equipped M2 does just that. It has an automatic rev-matching function, but it’s easy to turn off. Once you have, the car benefits from some great dynamic fundamentals: a powerful, free-revving six-cylinder engine with a superbly broad spread of accessible torque, a fairly compact and very nicely balanced rear-wheel-drive chassis with a shortish wheelbase and a kerb weight that… well, let’s say it’s low enough.

Bang on 1700kg isn’t exactly light for a smallish sports coupé. When the other rear-driver in your group test weighs less than 1100kg, there’s no denying that.

Look up the homologated kerb weight on a 2017 ‘F87’ M2 and you will discover that this car has put on a shade over 200kg between early examples of the last-generation car and this one, and there are one or two hints of that extra weight in the way it rides and turns in.

None, however, in the way it performs – because a smidgeon over 400lb ft of torque, available across about half of the ‘S58’ straight six ’s operating rev range, feels like a whole heap. After the merest milli-pause for its twin turbos to spool, the M2 has the kind of thrust that often makes a downshift entirely optional when the road ahead opens and you feel like cracking on.

That is something you can say, in an even more emphatic way, of the Civic Type R – where maximum torque can rip through the driveline, in any one of several gears, a little like a clay pigeon catapulting away from a launcher. But, funnily enough, the opposite is true of the MX-5, where absolutely every downshift matters. We will come back to that.

Best manual gearbox: shift quality

For now, let’s get into the detail on shift quality – because if not here, where else? The M2’s feels very BMW: a little elastic and springy, but medium-heavy and deliberate with it, and quite long of throw.

The cables moving the individual gears around have that little bit of give in them, but are plainly quite strong and under plenty of consistent tension – as if you could remove them, lash them together and use them in the gym.

There’s a sense of stretch and twang, then – of give and release to every shift – but no real slack to speak of. It’s a gearbox that rewards a double-tap of the clutch pedal, a medium-firm hand, and a syncopated sense of timing – which, in a nicely evocative way, is how BMW manual ’boxes have felt for as long as I’ve been driving them.

There is less springy compliance, and more mechanical definition, about the six-speed shift action in the Civic Type R Limited Edition. When it launched the previous-generation ‘FK8’ Civic Type R in 2017, Honda took the 2.0-litre, three-pedal powertrain package from the previous car and revised it in plenty of telling ways, the transmission getting a lighter flywheel and a shorter final drive for starters.

Then, in 2020, when the Type R GT and the Limited Edition emerged, it added a teardrop-shaped aluminium shift knob containing a 90-gram counter weight intended to refine the car’s shift quality to an even higher standard.

Our test car, it should be noted, had 20,000 pretty hard miles on it, so wasn’t nearly as box-fresh as either the BMW or the Mazda. Even so, it felt good. The shift action is shorter and lighter than the BMW’s; less springy, with more mechanical definition.

If you like to feel that you’re working the synchro with your finger tips, enmeshing each gear in turn at really close quarters, it’s your kind of gearbox.

It’s very much a ‘one-and-two’ kind of shift action, though: you tease each ratio out of train, cross the gate, then slot the next – with just a little bit of dislocated feel to the lever as it crosses over.

It’s slick enough, rarely baulking or crunching even if you hurry it. But, because of its relative lightness and that split second of floaty stasis, you don’t feel as if good pedal timing is too important to nailing the perfect change. When you really zero in on the fine detail, there’s just a tiny, momentary hint of vagueness to it.