Quote Originally Posted by vt_maverick View Post
No the VX was never offered with a manual transmission. I don't think we have any way to know whether the race VX's were built with 5-speeds at the factory or at an Isuzu Motorsports facility, but frankly I don't think it makes sense to do it on the same factory assembly line that's producing production VX's. You'd have to train your workers to make sure they knew the manual transmission installation procedures, stock the correct parts for exactly 5 variations, take time off of normal production, etc. I think it's far more likely that the factory provided either 5 auto VX's or 5 VX "shells" without a transmission yet installed to Isuzu Motorsports, who then finished the job in their own facility. If Isuzu had sold an "IM" variant of the VX with a manual you could say it was "offered" but otherwise I return to my previous analogy: Ford enthusiasts can't claim the Taurus was "offered" with a 1000 HP engine just because their NASCAR teams run them that way.

I don't think we are saying" offered" for sale, but rather that the VX was designed from the outset to handle this transmission variation for factory racing purposes, only. Also, the parts catalog had to include those manual transmission pages to accomodate this intention because of other shared parts with the factory race cars.