The game sabotages automatic and manual gearing, and it should not, especially since we aren't even given the basic option to have manual/automatic depend on discipline.
The way you directly penalize automatic drivers in low gears with refusing to shift is outright belligerent and wrong. There is no place for that getting built in the game so significantly. At least give us something reasonable like tapping boost near max rpm to purposely trigger the shift up, so automatic drivers can have a fun way to start better instead of just listening to the engine audio yelling about how deliberately obnoxious the game is being.
The big problem with manual is the broken control mapping system that makes it really difficult to get mappings you want, and the pointless difficulty of getting to reverse, which should not be a thing in a reasonably designed game, especially since if we are reversing we are probably already being penalized and unhappy, so this is a bad time for the game to show particularly bad behavior making us tap-tap-tap our way seven or more times down through the completely pointless neutral and all the way down to reverse.
First of all, there should be no Neutral in the gear list. This is stupid wasting time getting to and from reverse, and doesn't belong.
Second, there should be some kind of quick access for reverse. I mapped a key to Reverse under gearing (which obviously should be set in ground vehicles, but is not), and it had no effect at all, even changing to h-shifter. Fixing that would help, but either way I suggest the addition of "hold gear-down to jump to reverse". This gives a manual shifter reasonably quick access to reverse, something that automatic transmission players already have and something you kind of expect from a, you know, vehicle.
Forza Horizon, for example, has gear-down drop directly to 1st when the car is not moving forward, and does not waste your time with a pointless neutral between 1 and R, and that is in a game that already offers rewind, so most players don't typically recover from problems by reversing out of them in the first place. For Crew to willfully sabotage the player like it does is just silly.
Also, never hide the tachometer if we can drive. That's just really obnoxious on manual.