Jay,
That seems to work - I think the 3.06 1st favors tight stalls and mild cams, ie a nearly flat power curve so the drop doesn't hurt so much. I grabbed my old 250 Nova as an example, stock 250cid, 4bbl, glide-3.08rear.
2.64
11.45 at 61.8
17.88 at 76.0
That much is pretty much what the real car ran on the GTECH.
Then I swapped in the Gonkulator to a 200-4r trans, 2.75 1st:
2.39
10.82 at 63.8
17.05 at 78.2
Finally, I just keyed in the new 700r4 GEARS, 3.06 and 1.63:
2.35
10.75 at 63.6
17.00 at 78.1
So that's a .08 gain in the 1/8 mile, and holding a .05 gain thru the 1/4 mile.
Still a small gain, and the thing to me is, the whole purpose of those fancy upscale transmissions is to have a lockup converter, so you could run higher stall, which would again negate the gain of the 3.06 1st gear. Well that was my intuition anyway. Then I repeated the Gonkulator, same setups, 3000 stall:
200-4r=2.75 3000 stall
2.24
10.51 at 64.1
16.72 at 78.4
700-r4=3.06, 3000 stall
2.16
10.43 at 64.0
16.65 at 78.3
So the 3.06 1st gear keeps, even adds to its small edge even with higher stall. Why? Because with that 3000 stall, we are back "on the converter" after the shift so it softens the 1-2 RPM drop. Very interesting.
So I'd just say, mild ie factory vanilla cam likes the 3.06, bigger cams like the 2.75 1st. In between probably it a tie.
