BackPacker,
I will bow to your superior on the packaging / layout point. Your points sound good to me (assuming the weight of gears is offset by the smaller engine giving equal or lower overall weight to ungeared).
I totally agree about cooling, the thought on air cooling was as much to placate the luddites as anything else! They seem to not believe (despite the evidence of the road vehicles they almost certainly drive) that materials and processes have so improved since the fifities that reliability and durability can be maintained (even improved) while functionality is improved.
Interesting one on the temperature gauge in your car. When I ran my own sports car company (the clue is in my forum name), the prototypes had conventional instruments and the temperature gauge would move with the conditions. The production cars had instruments driven by the digital CANBUS signal and behave exactly as you describe. I have long suspected that this is the instrument pack logic being programmed to keep the needle in the mid position unless the coolant is either very hot or very cold.
Cheers
Joe