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Can someone please help me. I'm so confused after spending hours researching on the internet. I want to buy a 2006/2007 C6 automatic corvette. I plan on doing bracket racing on the weekends. Nothing wild, just basic bolt ons. I've raced camaros, stangs, challengers but never a vette. I see it comes factory with 2.56 gears. I wanted to upgrade the gears to say 3.73. From what I've researched, to upgrade to these gears it says you have to have a minimum of 3.15 gears on your car to begin with. This is where I'm confused. I don't see any info that supports this car with having an option from the factory of having 3.15 gears. Does this mean I couldn't upgrade the gears?
2020 Corvette of the Year Finalist (track prepared)
2019 C6 of Year Winner (track prepared)
Originally Posted by Bass Tracker
Can someone please help me. I'm so confused after spending hours researching on the internet. I want to buy a 2006/2007 C6 automatic corvette. I plan on doing bracket racing on the weekends. Nothing wild, just basic bolt ons. I've raced camaros, stangs, challengers but never a vette. I see it comes factory with 2.56 gears. I wanted to upgrade the gears to say 3.73. From what I've researched, to upgrade to these gears it says you have to have a minimum of 3.15 gears on your car to begin with. This is where I'm confused. I don't see any info that supports this car with having an option from the factory of having 3.15 gears. Does this mean I couldn't upgrade the gears?
Jay Dee
The easiest and cheapest way to upgrade is with a C6 Z06 differential as it's stronger than any of the other upgrade options like swapping gears in your current differential. It specifically has to be from a Z06 though and not a 3.42 base model car as the spline count is wrong (27) and the automatic needs a 30.
With that said however, surprisingly there's not much of a gain with the upgrade from 2.56s to 3.42s in the 1/4 mile, although it is noticeably more responsive on the street. The reason for the minimal difference is that what you gain off the line gets offset by having to make one extra shift. With 2.56s you'll cross the traps at the top end of 3rd, compared to 4th gear with 3.42s. I've switched back and forth a few times over the years and on my high 9 second car the switch was only good for about a tenth drop in my ET.
Also, you can run some pretty stout numbers with just a base model 2.56 differential. This was from late last year (I'm on the left):