IMO, and just IMO, if you need to put a cat or a pair of them on the car, the visual of seeing them there would make them happy. A well tuned carb, powerful ignition and proper timing will be good enough to pass with mild cams.
Walk through summit racings search engine and seek out high flow cats. I was in the same position a good 25 years back in New York when the state started to follow the Cali. rules on emissions. In order to have my ‘79 Magnum pass the inspection, visual as well as tail pipe test, I used twin high flow cats. The car passed as a later ‘80’s car really well. The techs were impressed that I could pull it off.
As a note, to add insult to injury, back in the day, NYS added Big Brother video cameras to every shop OK’d by the state for yearly inspections to check up on the shops to make sure the car actually was on the dyno rollers to test the vehicle “At Speed” as if it was rolling down the Hwy @ 55mph.
