COBB Tuning’s Double Adjustable Shifter
By Rick Reimundez
One of the first things I do when I get my hands on a manual shift car is find out what I can do to shorten the throws, height, and improve the feel of the shifting. And if you’ve got a WRX or STI — formerly STi but changed in 2006 — COBB Tuning has you covered. Their-double adjustable shifter is designed and engineered in-house, and’ll let you dial in the precise feel you want need.
Double-adjustment means you can adjust both the throw of the shifter as well as the lever height independently to get just the right shift feel. Installation involves getting under the car and taking some stuff apart, but once you’ve installed it, you can adjust it from the cabin by just pulling up the center consoler shifter surround.
The shifter is milled from billet aluminum, and the main body is anodized blue. With the new shifter you still retain full reverse lockout functions. But you’ll need to be careful how low you set the knob height as the reverse lockout cable needs to be secured away from the driveshaft with some zip ties. Otherwise, the interference can damage the cable.
You can retain your factory shift knob, too, or replace it with any aftermarket knobs that are designed to fit the stock lever.
On the STI, $165 isn’t a lot as far as short shift kits go, and the improvement is something you’ll feel and enjoy every time you take it out for a spin. COBB Tuning also offers a double-adjustable shifter for other Subaru models as well like the vanilla WRX — including the new 2008 model — Legacy, Forrester, and even the older Imprezas. The pricing for those ranges from $130 to $165.
Double Adjustable Shifter [COBB Tuning]
Street Prices [Google Products]
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Since I bought my 2003 WRX brand new, I have been a big part of the WRX/STI community over on the ClubWRX forums… I was looking to get a “short shifter” for my Rex, and this one was at the top of my list. After doing a bunch of research though, a lot of the forum members said that the factory STI shifter (with linkage) is the best way to go. If I remember correctly, everyone was saying that the COBB adjustable shifter could really hurt your transmission if you weren’t careful when you set it up. It turns out that you can actually set the shifter to change gears faster than the synchros can operate, and that’s obviously not a good thing. On top of that, the older WRX models had/have notoriously weak manual transmissions. There was never any shortage of “my transmission took a dump” threads on the forum… I hear that they (Subaru) fixed the problem in later years though.
Anyway, this looks like an awesome shifter, just be sure you set it up properly before taking it for a spin!