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?
In: 11
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)
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