It's always something on this car. I have a 1989 Firebird 2.8l V6. The car sat for about 2 months. When it was parked everything was fine with it. I started it up. Shifter worked fine, reversed, put into drive and took it for a ride.

Parked car somewhere and when I started it up, I noticed the shifter feels funny. Normally the shifter feels very firm going into reverse but now it seems there is play from park to reverse. Also it seems like it skips past reverse and doesn't engage in reverse. I go a bit farther to get into drive. Although I'm not sure if I'm in drive or overdrive. In order to get into reverse, I have to go from drive to reverse, then reverse seems to engage just fine and works. Once in drive or reverse, car seems to have no trouble shifting or driving.

Inspected the transmission fluid. Used to be reddish brownish, notice its more brown now. Also the fluid seemed to be overfilled. Last time I checked, the fluid was at the correct level. So something must be leaking into the trans fluid. Took out a water bottle worth of fluid to get it down to the right level. Might be time for a radiator change. Getting into drive or reverse has always been kind of jerky. Car revs high when first turned on and always felt like it slammed into gear causing car to shake when going into drive.

There's definitely something odd going on with the transmission fluid, probably the radiator, but could that affect the shifting as I have described? Or would that moreso just be a cable or something in the shifter crapping out?

 

Most likely, the cable.

Inspect the ends first, both at the transmission and at the shifter. Might be something loose at those points.

 

Eventually it stopped shifting altogether. Looking under the car, noticed the cable came loose. Seems like the cable has a plastic fitting and it fits over a little metal nub that's by the transmission oil pan. Is there something missing here to keep that attached to the nub? If not, the issue is probably that the two bolts that keep the shifter line close to the pan are missing, so the line has a lot of play and not lined up correctly with the nub. Hoping that replacing those bolts just works.

 

That cable end just sorta snaps over the mushroom linkage. No retainer or anything. Yours looks largely OK from what I can see of it.

Yes having those bolts that hold that bracket not there, is about guaranteed to make the whole deal work ALOT worse, since the way it works is, the cable outer is fixed firmly to the transmission, while the inner emerges or retracts to operate the linkage. No firm fixing, no push on the linkage when the inner moves.

 

Bought a replacement bolt and tightened things up. All seems well now.