What Is A Short-Throw Shifter & Is It Worth Installing On Your Project Car?

Tinkering with a project car can be fun, and one of the easiest and most affordable mods to enhance your driving experience is by adding a short-throw shifter. It might not make your car go faster but it sure does make things a lot more tactile and fun, while also making your shifts faster. A short-throw shifter, as the name suggests, shortens the throw of your gear shifts.

You are able to shift quicker, and it feels more engaging. Not all factory manual transmissions are nice to drive. Some are very mushy in the way the gears slot in and many have pretty long throws which might take away from the joys of having a manual transmission. A short-throw shifter helps quite a bit in these scenarios and is definitely a worthwhile investment. It also doesn't take a lot of time to fit into your car and one can easily add it in a matter of a couple of hours.

With a background in modifying cars for quite some time now, building cars for rally racing and track use, I have always liked a nice short-throw shifter, especially on cars which have cable driven shifter linkages. Many of the short-throw shifters are also made of solid metal rather than plastic which also increases the tactility of the shifts and gives positive feedback while pushing hard.

A short-shifter does not alter anything in your transmission and rather alters the length of the shift lever itself from its pivot point. The length from the pivot point to the transmission linkage is increased while the length from the pivot point to the top of the gear lever is decreased. This allows for shorter throw shifts as the distance between gear shifts is reduced.

Some cars, like the Mazda MX5 Miata, have a linkage-driven shifter. This means that the shifter is directly connected to the transmission via a mechanical shaft. These feel much more tactile to operate and adding short-throw shifter is also an easier task on these types of setups.

Many front wheel drive cars like the Honda Civic Type R, have cable-driven shifters wherein the gears are engaged via a cable. These types of shifters are less tactile and usually need metal bushings and plates to make them feel better. The shortening of the throw however works in the same way but their installation technique is a little different.