I have a 72 coupe with 24,000 original miles on it. I took it to the 1/8th mile Friday night for test and tune and I was running in the mid 10's. I was told that's pretty good for a stock 72 with a 302 and C4 in it. The only performance mod is the dual 40 series flows. I would really like to be able to run in the mid to upper 7's on the 1/8th mile but this is my show car and I want to be able to keep it that way. Should I hop up the stock engine, or should I buy another engine and tranny? I was thinking a 347 crate engine from Ford racing and a TCI street fighter C4? I want to be able to put it bavck to stock really quickly so that I can take it to all original shows.

 

Your are a hero when you call an engine an transmission swap something that is done really quickly, of course this is a relative term. With such a low mileage car, I would consider leaving it alone, except for TLC, and look for a car to hot rod. But some thoughts if you want to continue down the proposed path.

I would start at the other end of the car and put in some drag gears, like 4.11. You could have a seperate pumpkin with the racing gears so you could switch back to street gears "really quickly". But your rearend is probably an 8" and for the kind of power your looking at you should consider a 9".

No replacement for displacement and 347 is about as big as it gets when starting with a 302 block. Now if you start with a 351W block, you could go all the way to 427, now that would be some serious stink!

Even with the 347 you would exceed the traction limits of a stock set up so... There goes the really quick change idea.

 

I know lower gears would really help me at the strip but since this is a street driven car and it doesn't have overdrive I would rather just add a posi to the stock rearend and keep stock gears in it. I know a guy who has a supercharged 351c with about 400 hp and he hasn't had any trouble with his 8". He is running 4.10s though. I would be willing to upgrade the gears to stouter ones but I would want to keep them in the stock ratio. I could also upgrade to 31 spline axles so basically it would be almost as stong as a 9" just a little bit weaker ring gear. By the term "really quickly" I mean a weekend. it shouldn't be too hard to do that as long as I used shorty direct fit headers that way I wouln't have to change the exhaust everytime. I personally don't really care if the car is all original, I like street rods. But if I decided to go back to stock for a while or for a show, I just don't want to have to totally re-do the car to do so. As far as the engine choice... would it be possible to put the stock tinware on a 347 and paint it to look like the stock 302? If so I might do that. It would really fool the folks at the strip! By the way... is a mid 10 second run pretty fast for my car?

 

Another idea I had would be to stock my stock engine and add a bigger cam with a short duration to keep a good idle. I could have to stock headsported or add a set of GT-40s and a full roller drivetrain. As far as traction goes, I would just mount some bold on torque bars on it and go for it. I wouldn't want to add to much traction because then its just gonna break the rear end. If it spins im not going anywhere but I would rather it do that tear up my car.

 

Or you can do what i did and find a wrecked v-8 explorer, take the 5.0 and build it up. Im converting mine to carb and c-4 b/c its easy and its super easy to hot-rod and for me to work on. I got my complete explorer for $500....these v-8s are awesome at producing big-power-numbers b/c it has the great-flowing gt-40/p heads, roller cam, and roller rocker setup.