Virtually all racing cars of today have six or seven (forward) gears. F1 cars used to have the latter number of gears for a quite a while, until the hybrid era where they started having eight
But why would they need so many? Wouldn’t seven gears suffice?
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the more gears, the bigger the chance that you can use the right gear for every angle and speed of a given curve and are always in the Rev segment for the optimal power.
F1 Cars can change gears incredibly fast and are accelerating and decelerating after and before curves more than most other racing cars, so having more gears is just better.
Also with low torque and high HP you generally want more gears anyway.
Every combustion engine has a range of rpms when it’s produces the most power. F1 Cars because of restrictions have a very high reving engine . That engine has a low torque ( which makes them relatively stable ) and very short range of rpms when it is in its optional revolutions. So too keep the engine in that range they have more gears . As to not lose top speed and acceleration.
Engines are only their most powerful at one specific RPM. The further away you get from that rpm, the less power you get. Adding an extra gear keeps them closer to that ideal rpm, and in a field where tenths of a millimeter matters, that little bit of extra average power matters.
The more gears you have available to you, the more control you have over the engine RPM at a given speed. Because engine torque is proportional to RPM, it allows them to control quite precisely control how much torque is being generated, as to avoid having too much or too little.
With too much torque you could spin the tyres and start sliding or spin. Too little and the car will ‘bog down’ and you won’t get as much speed as you could do.
Newer cars are coming with 8, 9, 10 forward gears because it allows the engine to operate in it’s most efficient RPM range for that application. For racecars, more gears give them the ability to maximize acceleration as well as too speed compared to fewer gears. In consumer cars, it allows for higher fuel efficiency without sacrificing as much acceleration and vice versa.
One extra point is that starting in the hybrid era teams have to fix their gear ratios for the season rather than being able to change them for each track like they did before. Having more gears makes it easier to tune the gearbox for the whole season.
The short reason is that the rules mandate 8 gears (and fixed gear ratios for the whole season)
The benefit of having lots of gears has been covered by everyone else’s answers, but there was once a prototype (that sadly never got to the race track) with a [CVT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission) – basically *infinite* gears.
The reason it never got to the race track was partly because it would have had such an advantage over the rest of the field as to make the competition utterly boring.
[YouTube video about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nWrDKGoYJo)
They could use three gears if they had to.
Racing has always been a test-bed for technologies that manufacturers wanted to experiment with for production vehicles.
Using more and more gears is just a part of that progression.
No answer is completely accurate so far.
F1 cars used to have 7 gears, and each of those gears were changed and tailored to each track they visited.
A team that can pay for a different gear set for each track has a big advantage over one that can’t afford that.
So the rule makers said the gearboxes had to last longer than just that one race, but also you needed one set of gear ratios for the whole season.
To help out with those gear ratios, they allowed 8 rather than 7 to allow a more flexible gear range.
The other comments address why that matters.
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