The fun stops at the end of the onramp. Your hi-po small-block spins up to 3500 rpm as the speedo needle settles at 60 mph, and a Yugo honks and blasts by on the left doing 80, hoisting the single-digit salute. Sure, you can beat anyone up the onramp and in brief forays to Ludicrous Speed, but the thought of traveling more than five miles at a normal highway pace is out of the question.
Sustained high speeds bring images of bearings wearing, valvesprings fatiguing and every other engine part screaming in pain. It’s more than your nerves can take. That’s what you get for 4.11 gears and no overdrive: low e.t.’s and great fun around town but living hell on the freeway. But take heart, HOT ROD has the answer. Swap that antiquated nonoverdriven gearbox for the latest in high-tech O.E.M. hardware—the Borg-Warner T56 six-speed.
The T56 is the same unit that comes in new Camaros, Firebirds and Dodge Vipers, and Borg-Warner is now offering an aftermarket version to fit older cars. What’s so trick about it? The T56 not only offers overdrive, it offers two overdrives. In the aftermarket unit, Fifth gear is a .84:1 ratio and Sixth gear is .62:1.
Borg-Warner designed the aftermarket T56 so that it bolts directly in place of a T5 five-speed, so installing one in your T5-equipped late-model Camaro or Mustang is no big deal—it’s almost a straight remove-and-replace procedure. Still, we wanted to know what would be involved in bolting the T56 into an older street machine with a conventional clutch and manual linkage, so we set about the task of bolting it into a ’69 Camaro. While we won’t kid you and say that it was an easy two-hour project, we will tell you that it’s not that tough.
Pricing depends on the independent distributors that will be selling the T56, but at the time of this writing, it was in the neighborhood of $2500. Midwest Truck & Auto Parts, D&D Performance and Perfection Hy-Test are the three known distributors at this time. Compare that price to other aftermarket or factory five- or six-speeds (most notably the ZF) as well as a bulletproof four-speed overdrive automatic trans, and you’ll see that the T56 is an affordable swap. We’ve also featured the other two six-speeds on the market: the ZF (found in Corvettes) and the Richmond Over Drive (ROD) six-gear. Borg-Warner also has the T56 for Ford applications, but it’s a different unit than what we’re profiling here.
