The First 8-Second Stick Shift C5 is an Absolute Blast to Watch Row Gears

If drag racing is the topic of discussion, there is absolutely no debate about it. If you’re driving automatic, almost every time you will have a faster pass than if you elect to drive that same car with a manual transmission. If you ask just about any drag racer, they will tell you all about how pretty much any manually shifted car would drop time off of every pass if an automatic transmission were put in its place. That isn’t to say that an automatic transmission is always the better for your situation but, and straight line throwdowns, it’s certainly the dominant way to get from one end of the track down to the other in the most efficient way that you possibly can.

Because it is such an efficient way to get down, you’ll see the vast majority of racers taking on an automatic transmission with their application. With that in mind, we happen to think that it’s a ton of fun to watch a well put together manually shifted car go to work. There aren’t a whole lot of them out there that can rip down the track like this so when you do come across a car that’s able to blast its way to some impressive quarter mile passes, you got to drop what you’re doing and watch it.

This time, we ride along with Jared Cocanougher and is manually shifted C5 Chevrolet Corvette Z06. This bad boy, built by Race Proven Performance and tuned by Shortuning has some major muscle under the hood as it sports a BTR 388″ solid roller engine and F1-X ProCharger amongst a myriad of other parts that help this thing lay down some major hurt through the 6-speed synchronized TR6060 transmission on the way to being the first manual C5 Z06 in the 8s! I don’t care how fast your car is, for a manually shifted car to make its way to those kinds of times, you have to be a pretty good driver as well.