In his 80's Bondurant's memory must be failing him Tim, he
seems to have underrated the power he had at his disposal
in his '57 Vette.
But..that certainly isn't a problem with Jerry who seems to be
able to remember all those facts and never needs to look it
up. I'm going in the same direction as Bondurant, can't
remember what I just ate as I'm rinsing the dishes, thank
God for the internet and spellchecker.
I think that was pretty typical back then Fred. Of course when
you hot rodded the engines you could get great performance
from Duntov's dream machine, as jerry brought up. When I was
selling Chevy parts back in the early 60's we sold a lot of
the Duntov cams and dual quad setups. They would give you
just as good of performance as the aftermarket high performance
parts for less. The stock small block had good lungs, with the
extra muscle the Vette cam provided, it just needed to be
fed the right diet. Zora brought a lot of the Ardun experience
with him when he hired on at Chevy.
Whole point here was that today, a stock, off the lot, 323 inch
work truck is kicking out more horsepower than the high
performance engines did back in the late 50's.
I didn't make a study of it when I bought the truck last year.
My "big old wife" did all the haggling, she's good at that
you know. All I did was tell her it had to be Red, small V8,
and have a towing package. I knew it had a lot of kick from
driving it these past few months but didn't realize till the
other day that it was capable of putting out that kind of HP.
In fact, what prompted me to pop the hood for the first time
was our discussion about the Dex-Cool. I wanted to make sure
the new truck came with it. I knew it had aluminum heads and
aluminum radiator cuz I could see a corner of each, but I
couldn't find the block to confirm what it was cast from
because of all the plastic covers, tubes and wires that
obscure the engine.
dg
