Evo Review

Evo's own Yousuf Ashraf installed one of our V3 kits in his Elise & wrote about it in the April '25 magazine.

A gearshift upgrade addresses a notorious Elise weak point

My cursor hovered over the checkout button for quite a while. Could a new gearshift mechanism really be worth £595? Replacing the Elise’s gearbox itself would cost less than that. But words like ‘billet aluminium’, ‘ballraced pivots’ and ‘SKF PTFE-lined spherical bearings’ had my attention and weren’t letting go. I’d been looking for a while, and Prodimex’s gorgeous re-engineered aluminium shifter looked like just the ticket.

Early Elises aren’t known for having a great gearshift. In fact, the one in my car felt awful when I first bought it, with a stodgy resistance across the gate and a vague, loose action in gears. Some of this, I suspected, was because the shifter links to the gearbox via cables rather than a direct connection. New solid shifter bushes improved things but it still wasn’t as positive as it could be.

This is where the Prodimex kit comes in. The company is run by Sheldon Holy, who has designed an upgrade kit that minimises play, shortens the action and reduces friction in the left-to-right plane, to give the Elise the shift it always deserved. Clearly, he also designed it to look fabulous – built from machined aluminium, it’s almost too nice to hide beneath the Elise’s plastic shifter housing (if it wasn’t for the messy cabling that also lives under the shroud, I would have left it exposed).

Installation took a couple of hours, most of which was spent on fine adjustments to get the action just so. This meant measuring the cable end stop screws for a more precise balance, and also refitting Prodimex’s upgraded billet bracket that aligns the shifter/gearbox connection. With the last bolts tightened, it slotted into place like a long-lost piece of the puzzle.

The first exploratory shifts in my garage were a revelation. Ratios now slot in more freely, the shift across the gate feels massively reduced and shorter as the gated play has been taken out, and more than anything, it makes a huge difference. It means that you now naturally want to use the revvy engine, popping one gear after the next, making cross-gate shifts so much more satisfying.

Out on the road I was happy to find that I hadn’t mucked up the installation. Every shift, with all five ratios, now engages seamlessly. The Elise’s gearshift is now a high point rather than a hindrance, and I couldn’t be happier – even if it did cost a few quid.

Yousuf Ashraf (@ashrafoncars)