Keep petroleum motor oil in there through the summer, then if you really can't wait, put synthetic in there in time for the colder weather. Let the poor car break in a little, first.
Driving manual transmission, best advice I can give is
1. be smooth ('nuff said)
2. wait for the equipment (you can feel when things are synchronized if you very gently push on the stick shift with the clutch pedal depressed while shifting gears, while you are in the neutral position and just about to push it into the next gear... there is a slight decrease in resistance felt in the shifter when things are lined up... after awhile, you will be able to do this by sound, timing and intuition, but to start with, try to feel it in the shifter)
BTW, number 2 only applies to upshifting (1 to 2 to 3...). Downshifting (5 to 4 to 3...), in order to get things really lined up, you should
2a. rev match (while clutch pedal is depressed, blip the gas pedal to bring revs up to where the lower gear is going to be)
2b. double clutch. It's a really fine point, but if you really want to drive a stick shift perfectly, you should double clutch. quickly, it involves rev matching, here are the points of a successful double clutch...
i. depress clutch pedal
ii. put shifter into neutral
iii. release clutch pedal
iv. blip throttle to match the revs
v. depress clutch pedal
vi. shift into lower gear
vii. release clutch pedal
viii. enjoy a perfect double clutch!
All those steps take a fraction of a second. Why all the clutch pedal action? The synchronizers in your manual transmission work to match your engine speed with your transmission speed whenever you shift into a gear. Just rev matching does not match the synchronizer speed to the transmission speed.
Double clutching, when done right, will minimize the work synchronizers have to do to match engine and transmission speeds, and could theoretically lengthen the life of your transmission (likelihood, low... transmissions are way better than they used to be, you'll most likely get tired of your car before you break/wear out a synchro).
More importantly, double clutching is really, really fun and racy! But if you can't do it quickly and smoothly, just rev match. If you can't rev match smoothly, then just be smooth
Another reason to double clutch... you can drive big trucks which don't have synchronized gears if you know how to double clutch... also, in the unlikely event you *break* a synchronizer in your transmission, you can still shift gears, since you are manually synchronizing the gears when double clutching.
