I would have to agree with sentry65 and cannysage people dont give it enough credit and are ignorant im not saying thats its the best ranny or anything like that but people talk so badly about it and swear it the worst thing you can do when you buy a car. And they dont see that every week someone has a problem with their manual tranny i wonder why. Manual is fun and my next car will be manual cause i just want to eat crap with it but if you want real 1/4 mile or straight line racing it doesnt get any better the a fully built AT. For autocross handsdown the manual is better and more fun. my 2 cents

 

I owned a 5AT Z before switching to manual and going down the modding path.

It's a decent AT -way better than almost any AT I've ever driven except obviously the sequential ones like Ferrari and Audi. I didn't like the delay that'd happen sometimes with it in manual mode where it'd sometimes change gears a second later after you clicked the lever. I also personally felt a little weird nudging the gear lever up or down a whole cm to shift. I felt that Drive mode was actually faster anyway. The car was bone stock though, I've never driven one that was highly modded so I really have no idea on how they perform other than what I've read.

Still though, I think it was a very capable transmission. I immediately liked the 6MT better, but after moddifying my car a lot, I'd be lying if I didn't occasionally think about replacing the transmission with something that didn't grind and didn't have such a short 1st gear. I've even considered auto, but right now the only auto that'll easily go in the Z is the TH400 which is only 3 gears (which seems better suited for a turbo setup IMO since you're getting good boost at 3500-4000 rpms)...I'd want at LEAST 4, if not 5 gears. I wonder why the vette's 6 speed hasn't been swapped into a Z yet. Either the Z06 or C6's tranny looks to have better gear ratios for FI, and we know they'll handle power