From having looked at Speedgate's RES file, I'm pretty much certain its downshift bug exists because of an abnormally high maximum RPM (byte 33h), well beyond the end of the torque curve. When you downshift a high-revving Speedgate, you don't get engine braking; rather, the car keeps its speed while revving higher than would otherwise be possible. If you do that while driving at a sufficiently high speed, you get powergear-like behaviour, which I haven't yet investigated closely enough to be able to describe in detail.
I looked up Speedgate in the wiki and there's a reference about a "mild pseudo-anti-powergear". Does this line refer to the same feature I'm talking about?
Not really; I wrote that passage long before we noticed the downshift bug. I believe the first pipsqueak to take advantage of that bug was Gutix, in his winning Z104 lap, though back then I think few, if any, among the rest of us understood clearly what was going on.
Anti-powergear refers to the ramp slowdown feature of the Countach. The Speedgate, like some other cars, is affected by slowdowns when landing from jumps at very high speeds. Nowadays I'm not actually sure if the same bug is involved in both cases, and I probably wouldn't use the term "anti-powergear" were I writing that article right now.
How do you guys feel about maybe loving this weirdness a little?
I find it rather difficult to warm to that bug because it feels too close for comfort to powergear on demand, which I tend to think of as a Niva-class anti-feature. In the past, I have even thought about publishing an alternative Speedgate with a working rev limiter... On the other hand, it could be interesting to explore which driving techniques would be needed to use the downshift bug to its fullest extent. And in any case, I will give Speedgate a go in the current R4K track
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