[Walt Fricke]

I assume the "gate" first mentioned here is the pair of vertical tabs on the piece the Seine design has you install on top of the shift tower, along with the hook you weld to the shift lever (after positioning it with hose clips)?

There is just one reason for this stuff, and it is to prevent the pressure from the Seine spring from traveling all the way back inside the transmission, where it causes the ball end of the dongle to press against the shift fork engagement slot, which in turn causes an axial pressure on the slot in the engagement sleeve/slider. I don't know just how much extra wear this causes back there. Perhaps not much, perhaps enough to worry about. But with spring pressure being arrested that way you get an extra whine.

This has something to do with why Porsche had two ears over on the right side of the tower, with a hook. Otherwise you'd have a whine in 5th. And on the highway you are in 5th a lot. Not having these tabs and hooks for 1/2 leaves you with a whine.

This is going to be true with any system which does what you really benefit from (spring loading in the 3/4 plane) but doesn't take dealing with the spring pressure while in 1/2. The original WEVO didn't account for this - Hayden thought it wasn't necessary. Maybe if you install the WEVO internal gate shift in the transmission, that is what deals with this pressure and avoids the whine?

I don't know how the other popular systems deal with this issue.

In any event, those tabs and hooks aren't normally called gates.

I've had a Seine in my SC for over 20 years, both in the car's street/track form, and its current dedicated track form, and the Seine has performed flawlessly. You should shift up, across, and up, etc, not fully diagonally, anyway. The internals of the transmission are designed that way. It is only because of slop (designed in, really, due to the width of the dongle ball, the shift fork engagement slots, and the general clearances in that part of the transmission) that you think and feel) you are shifting diagonally.

Were I to do it over again, I think I'd use the Karsten gizmo. Nice minimalist approach. But I would weld on ears and a hook, because I don't think it accounts for where the system resists the spring's pressure while you are in 1/2d gear.

Porsche eventually decided it should spring load its transmissions into the 3/4 plane. I don't work on my 07 turbo, so don't know what they did. How did they deal with the residual pressure issue? No whines in 1/2 or 5/6.

If your Seine feels like it springs back to the 3/4 plane when in 1st or 2d, I'd say one or more of your shift system bushings - either the ball cup up front, or the shift coupler in the rear - have excessive wear. Or you got so used to where the shift know was when you had these useful things in place that you are noticing the small movement. It isn't going to pop you out of gear, because it is the fore and aft motion of the lever which does that - engages and disengages a gear. The side to side motion only selects the gear plane to be engaged.