TREMEC Life Tag

The first TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout of 2023 had drama, firsts, and plenty of great drag racing action!

Participants with a manual-transmission car competing in NMRA’s most popular racing class, True Street, are eligible to compete in the TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout. If you’re not familiar with the True Street class, it’s open to any street-legal, Ford-powered and Ford-bodied vehicle that is street legal. From bone-stock cars and trucks to street-legal street/strip vehicles, regardless of driving experience anyone can enter and become a participant instead of just spectating at an NMRA event.

Mike Copeland and his company, Arrington Performance, made headlines in 2021 with the 1948 Chevrolet Truck they built showcasing a hydrogen fuel conversion system being developed for existing internal combustion (ICE) gasoline-fueled engines. Now they’ve taken the concept to the next level with the recently completed 1964 Ford Falcon built with a modern Ford Gen 3 Coyote V8 that runs on hydrogen and is backed by a TREMEC TKX 5-speed transmission.

The TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout is back for the 2023 NMRA racing season, pitting the eight quickest and best manual-transmission racers against each other for ¼-mile gear jamming supremacy.

“To say the TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout has been a success is a huge understatement,” explains Mike Kidd, Aftermarket Business Unit Manager for TREMEC “Having a manual transmission adds so much excitement to driving, both on the road and at the race track. Having an event where racers can take their TREMEC-equipped vehicles to the limit in a safe environment is a lot of fun while showing everyone the performance that TREMEC 5- and 6-speeds are capable of, whether it’s a factory OE TREMEC or one of our aftermarket transmissions.”

It’s time to go to school. Driving school that is. No matter your current level of driving skill, there is always a benefit to spending time with professionals to sharpen your abilities behind the wheel. TREMEC partnered with Skip Barber Racing in 2021 to help new drivers learn how to drive manual transmission equipped vehicles. We thought it would be helpful to provide you with what you’ll need to know to get the most of your first driving school experience.

As third-pedal enthusiasts are bombarded with talk of electric cars, autonomously driving cars and eliminating gasoline and diesel engines, the future can seem bleak. But as we showed with our recent blog on the Jeep Magneto 2.0 Electric Wrangler the move to alternative propulsion for vehicles doesn’t mean the end of shifting your own gears. And here’s another example that doesn’t run on gasoline or diesel but does have a TREMEC TKX 5-speed transmission – this one makes its horsepower by burning hydrogen.

Without any shadow of a doubt, the quickest street-legal, production Ford Mustang ever to roll from a showroom floor is the 2020-present Ford Mustang Shelby® GT500®. It packs a 760-horsepower punch, with wicked torque from the 5.2L supercharged V8. It pulls hard from idle to 7,500 rpm and can propel the 4,000-plus pound Pony car down the quarter-mile in under 10-seconds at over 130 mph in stock trim! And it does it with a TREMEC TR-9070 DCT 7-speed transmission making the gear shifts in as little as 80 milliseconds.

The latest TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout took Norwalk, Ohio, by storm June 9-12, 2022, during the NMRA Ford Performance Nationals at the Summit Motorsports Park.

Three times a year in Bradenton, Florida; Norwalk, Ohio; and Bowling Green, Kentucky, Ford enthusiasts have the chance to compete in the TREMEC Stick Shift Shootout. The shootout is a specialty event within TorqStorm Superchargers True Street that’s designed to be an all-out race for street-legal Ford owners who run a manual transmission.

A hot button topic (to say the least) these days are EVs (electric vehicles) and the various aspects of owning and driving them. For those who love having a manual transmission in their vehicle, the perception is owning an EV means losing the driving enjoyment of shifting your own gears. But the Jeep Magneto 2.0 EV Wrangler concept vehicle solidly proves that you can still enjoy the fun of a manual transmission, featuring a TREMEC Magnum 6-speed.