ORIGINAL: 67mustang302

I've never seen a truely honest test of muscle era engines. Dynos can be very decieving, either unintentionally or intentionally. The fact of the matter is that 600hp isn't all that easy to coax out of a big block these days(it can be done, but requires decent parts and costs decent money), and it sure ain't gonna happen with a stock flat tappet cam and low voltage ignition, maybe not even with stock heads. The few times I've seen actual STOCK(I mean truely stock engine) muscle cars run, their trap speeds didn't show anything close to the kinda of horsepower they supposedly had.

The problem is that you're not likely to find an actual stock engine any more. The ones that claim to be stock are often rebuilt using much more modern parts, and because the intake and heads are the same someone says it's stock. The fact of the matter is from the outside there's no way you could tell the difference between a stock 427 with a flat tappet cam, and a wild *** solid rollered 427 stroker with worked stock heads and intake. Too many people like to play the "Oh, yeah, it's stock" game, when the fact is it's anything but stock.

ORIGINAL: Norm Peterson

Even the flat-tappet hydraulic cam profiles available in recent years are significantly better than what was actually in production use back in the 60"s. Back in the day, the SBC "151" (an abbreviation of its part number) cam was THE hot street cam. Any number of newer cams are much better at power/torque and driveability, and the really powerful new ones are much more so. So it's still not necessarily a true "apples to apples" comparison.


Norm