what exactly are the benefits of a twin clutch transmission? I know that a separate clutch is used for the odd and even gears, but how does that improve the performance? Doesn't the shifting mainly depend on the driver rather than the transmission itself? if so, what makes the TC-SST faster than an ordinary every manual tranny?

Because it's not relying on a human being to push the clutch pedal in, move the shifter to the next gear, and let the clutch back out, it can make that same operation take way less time.

It's just way faster at gear changes from what I've heard. That's the big performance advantage. They're also more consistent than they would be with a human at the controls. It turns what can be a clunky procedure to an electro mechanical symphony of speed.

I'm not sure of the advantage of two clutches. I could see it would cut down on wear and heat to have two. It might also be necessary for the particular design setup inside the trans.

I'm not a big fan of the new trans since it doesn't have quite the HP holding capability of the standard. For someone who doesn't want to mod much it's good.

As I understand it, there actually is no "shifting" as we think of it. When driving an SST in, say, 1st gear the transsmission already has 2nd gear selected on the other shaft. So when it "shifts" one clutch opens while at the same time the other clutch closes. It is not a three-step process as in a standard shift car - clutch in, gear change, clutch out. With the SST it is reduced to a one-step process, which makes "shifting" extremely quick.