This is not an American Powertrain Parting Shift that’s chock full of tricky shifting, some gazillion dollar car, or a big rig with six shift levers coming up through the floor. Nope, this is the essence of the program dialed right into the reason we love manual transmissions. You are going to ride with a dude as he runs his Nova down the strip. He winds it up hard, bangs the gears swiftly, and while he turns on the red light at the bottom of the tree, he’s still having more fun than us!
This little Nova has a 327ci small block Chevy engine, 4.56 gears in the rear end, and a Muncie M-22 rock crusher sending the power to those tractor puller cogs. The transmission has a 2.00 first gear according to the guy who posted the video. While he does not straight up power shift this transmission, he does the job well and keeps the revs up which makes the little engine chew up the race track nicely.
What’s it run? How about 12.00 at 116mph which for a little small block in a steel car is pretty neat. We know, we know, guys run 5s in street cars but a kid running 12s in a cool little Nova is the kind of thing that makes us smile on a Friday and we think it should make you smile, too. Yeah, the new car buying populace has all but abandoned the manual transmission but hot rodders? Never.
