Consider this; you are racing a car that without any mods has 227 horsepower and 217 ft/lbs, and weighs roughly the same as a PT Cruiser... now with stage one, you have 8 more horsepower than him, and an additional 43 pounds of torque. I would hope you'd at least be able to keep up with him. Yes, manual versus automatic does make a difference. You want a real race, take off your stage 1 and then see who wins, that will really be a matter of driver ability.
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