Reply to "Engine swap...big block..."

My brother put a Ford 460 in his Superformance Cobra. Kept the weight down with aluminum heads. Weight difference is suprisingly small. He races it from time to time and has no problem overtaking anyone with a high performance small block. On top of the obvious power, it has incredible durability. He put several thousand hard miles on it and saw many small blocks strung out who couldn't finish race after race. He eventually pulled it to put a bored and stoked monster. He is re-building the first. After tearing it down it had zero bearing wear and zero cylinder wall wear.

The big blocks have the durability, power, torque. A suprising bennifit was the compression braking. He found it to be quite usefull in the road coarses. He aslo was suprised to find the mentality of people who would say "Why not a 302, a 302 was a "Race" engine!". Guys over power their small blocks often didn't finish a weekend at the track. A 302 or other small engines were race engines because of the limitation of CU deffigned by the race, not because it was a good size for the car.

If you can keep the weight within reason it has the power also comes with durability.