Welcome to the exclusive club - there were only ever 397 Ventos brought into Australia by VWA.
Auto to manual conversion, if you want better performance it is the way to go. May I suggest following Dylan8's example, take out the whole engine/transmission package and replace with a manual VR6 engine/transmission package (2.8l V6 engine that was shoehorned into the Mk3 by VW) so that should give you a good performance boost plus the manual box at the same time.
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