It’s no secret that American car enthusiasts appreciate big engines. Give us a booming exhaust note and torque for days, and we’ll gladly work with whatever downsides may accompany it—say, being the size of a small house, for example. And yes, we especially like them in our sports cars, which tend to be big and bold rather than svelte and slinky. And until only recently, the best of them all had something in common: a six-speed Tremec manual gearbox.
Throughout the late aughts and 2010s, every poster-worthy American car with a six-speed manual was rocking a variant of the Tremec TR-6060. And when we say “every,” we really mean every. Viper? Check. Corvette? Check (though it was the TR-6070 in later years, to mark its seven speeds). Challenger? Camaro? ATS/CTS-V (and their Blackwing replacements)? Check, check, and check/check (check/check)! Even the manual Cadillac ATS (non-V) got a variant of the Tremec ‘box.
To save time, there’s really only one mainstream American sporty car that didn’t adopt the TR-6060: Mustang—and even that comes with a caveat. A couple of the Shelby variants swapped one in to replace the standard transmission (including the Getrag that was introduced for the Mustang’s 2015 redesign), and prior to that, the Mustang used the five-speed cousin of Tremec’s T56, which was itself the TR-6060’s predecessor.
Originally a Borg-Warner design, the T56 was the six-speed of choice for the entire previous generation of American sports cars (and even the Dodge Ram SRT-10). You can get the entire history of Tremec in Kyle’s excellent video, but the short version is this: It’s just TR-6060s all the way down. Or at least it was…
Fast-forward to 2026. Viper is dead, as is Camaro. And while the balance of the above models still exists, vanishingly few of them are still offered with a stick shift. The Corvette went to a dual-clutch automatic with its mid-engine pivot, and Ford still uses the Getrag six-speed in its road-going Mustangs. That leaves Cadillac’s CT5-V Blackwing carrying the flag—and man, what a standard bearer…
When the big Blackwing goes away this year, it will mark the end of the TR-6060 in production cars. Are there other six-speeds out there? Sure. Was the TRT-6060 the best manual gearbox ever produced? Nah, not by a longshot. But it gave us hit after hit despite resistance from market forces and regulations alike, and that alone makes it worth celebrating.
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