Oh, how we all lament the dying off of passenger cars and manual transmissions in this day and age. How we look at plastic covered bumpers on silver lumps rolling down the Interstate and think back fondly to the days of chromed bumpers, aggressive cam profiles and the days when the family car had three pedals and nobody bitched or complained about it. Those days…gone. Long gone, in fact. Finding a four-door family car that came with a manual trans started to become an oddity in the 1970s and by the 1990s, was nearly extinct outside of a few models. You could find someone trying to stuff a T-56 into an Impala SS, sure, but that wasn’t the normal. You weren’t going to get a Chrysler Concorde with any kind of RWD powertrain and a T-5, and don’t even ask about the Taurus…excepting some of the SHO models, that’s a sincere nope. Either you have to engineer it yourself or you hunt down older sheetmetal that came with it…and good luck finding such a vehicle. That’s a needle in a haystack.

Well, we found one, a 1963 Chrysler Newport. Fitted with a three-speed manual trans on the floor instead of a pushbutton TorqueFlite, this 361-powered sled has seen some tweaks like shaved rear door handles and the removal of the “redundant” air conditioning. (Seller’s words, not ours.) The lines of the squared-off and fin-less C-bodies of this generation bridge the gap nicely between the fuselage cars of the 1970s and the wildness of the Exner-designed 1950s, better than the Elwood Engel slab-side look in my opinion. But you don’t see many of these being built, and this one should be done up, if for the manual transmission setup alone.

But how to do it? My build pattern is predictable: black paint, clean chrome, rot repair, and move on to a 400 block that’s seen some work. But what gearbox to back it? If it’s the A745 three-speed, it’d be relatively straightforward to slot in an A833 four-speed. But a car like this needs to be a highway cruiser…it’s too heavy to be much of anything else. For that, a six-speed would probably be a better choice unless you could find an auxiliary overdrive unit for the A833. Keep power levels just north of 500, restore the interior to high spec, and boom, you’ve got the coolest car in the school line when it’s time to pick up the brats for the afternoon. Oh, one other thing: put A/C back into the car! Vintage Air, something!

What say you, readers?

eBay Link: 1963 Chrysler Newport