lappy-paddle fingertip gear selection on the steering wheel is the in-thing in modern high-performance cars (well, maybe not next year’s Gen3 Supercars, but that’s another story), but back in the day there was nothing more daggy). This was an ingenious idea, because it prevented the Aussie four-speed from performing its peculiar (and unwanted) party trick of selecting reverse and first gear at the same time. Sometimes when shifting from reverse back to neutral, the lever would pop out but the selector would remain engaged, allowing the driver to then grab first gear while the box was still engaged in reverse. A famous case of this occurring was when Sir Jack Brabham stalled his Torana L34 on the grid at Bathurst in 1976. Brabham and co-driver Stirling Moss could have done with a Speco shifter at Bathurst that year.
