Peitz Performance will put a clutch pedal in your C8 Corvette for $74,528. A brand-new 2027 Corvette Stingray, delivered, starts at $73,795.
Read those numbers again. Saving the manual now costs more than the car Chevrolet sells without one.
Seven years after the mid-engine Corvette arrived and quietly ended the three-pedal era, the stick shift is back. Chevrolet had nothing to do with it.
The hardware comes from Tremec, the same company that supplied manual Corvettes for decades. Its new six-speed transaxle debuted at last year’s SEMA Show, rated for up to 1,000 pound-feet of torque and built to survive the Z06’s 8,600 rpm redline.
That second figure should sting in Detroit. Tremec built a manual that can handle the wildest naturally aspirated engine Chevy makes, and Chevy still said no.
Peitz did the dirty work. The conversion pulls out the factory eight-speed dual-clutch and installs Tremec’s TR9060, a concentric slave cylinder, a new flywheel and clutch, and a modified clutch pedal borrowed from the Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing.
That pedal is a nice touch. The Blackwing is one of the last GM performance cars that still offered a manual, and now one of its parts is keeping the idea alive inside a Corvette.
The mechanical parts are the easy half. The hard part is the electronics.
Peitz uses a MoTeC M182 plug-and-play ECU and a MoTeC M150 transmission control unit to make the swap talk to the rest of the car. The TCU blips the throttle on downshifts and cuts ignition on upshifts, while tracking clutch position, gear position, and transmission fluid temperature.
The M182 goes further. Owners can dial in rolling anti-lag, adjustable traction control, and support for nitrous and methanol systems.
None of this is a weekend bolt-on, and none of it is cheap. The $74,528 covers hardware and software only, and you bring your own Corvette.
The math gets uglier from there. Anyone starting from scratch is looking at roughly double the cost of a base Stingray before paying a single hour of labor.
Peitz isn’t the first to try this. In July, California’s Rezvani showed its own gated shifter for the C8, developed with Italy’s Studio Carrozzi.
That setup is theater. It sits on top of the existing dual-clutch, has no clutch pedal, and lets the driver change gears without lifting off the throttle.
The gate looks right and clicks right. Underneath, the computer is still doing the work.
Peitz is selling the opposite: a real clutch, a real transaxle, and a real chance of missing a shift. That last part is exactly what buyers have been begging for.
The C8 was Chevrolet’s proof that an American car could stand next to Europe’s mid-engine exotics for a fraction of the money. It made the case convincingly, and part of the deal was giving up the manual.
Now a tuner and a supplier have shown the engineering was possible all along. The only thing missing was the will in Warren.
Will enough owners pay a second Corvette’s worth of money to prove the point? Only the order book will tell, and Peitz is taking orders.
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