Forty years at the strip

Performance and racing gearbox upgrades

We have built gearboxes for racing applications for over forty years, and we did the learning on our own cars. Some of them made 1500hp. If you need a transmission that will take a hammering, that experience is what you are buying.

We will not learn on your car

That sentence has been on our wall a long time and we mean it literally. Over the years this business has sponsored and campaigned numerous track cars, and every one of them was a test bed paid for out of our own pocket. What survives and what lets go, at what power, with what preparation - we found out the expensive way so that a customer's car does not have to.

It is a tough school. A gearbox behind a heavily boosted engine on slicks is asked to do something entirely different from the same casting in a road car, and the parts that fail first are not always the ones you would guess.

Start with the whole picture, not a parts list. Power figure, weight, tyre, how it is launched, whether it sees the street, and what you are prepared to rebuild between meetings. The right build changes completely depending on those answers, and it is the cheapest conversation in the whole project.

What an upgrade can involve

Uprated internals where the standard components are the known weak point
Clutch and flywheel matched to the power and to the way the car is launched
Shift quality and speed, including the linkage and selector detail that gets ignored
Cryogenic treatment of gears, shafts and bearings to lift wear resistance and fatigue life
Preparation for the launch loads, which is where most drivetrains actually break
Assembly to clearances suited to the application rather than to a road car

Road cars too

Not everyone is going racing. A well sorted fast road car benefits from the same thinking on a smaller scale: better shift feel, a clutch that can hold what the engine now makes, and internals that will live behind the extra torque a tune has added. The mistake we see most often is an engine built well past what the standard drivetrain behind it was ever meant to hold, with nothing done about it.

Who we work with

DragCircuitClub sprintHillclimb Street performanceTurbocharged and supercharged Engine builders and tuners

Plenty of our performance work comes through engine builders and tuners who would rather hand the transmission side to someone who only does transmissions. That is welcome, and there is more on how we work with the trade on trade supply.

Talk to us before you build the engine

Genuinely. The best time to work out what the gearbox needs is while the power target is still a number on a whiteboard, not after the first pass ends with an expensive noise. Ring 0800 432 726 and tell us what you are planning.