440 Help Needed

No way in the world a 3.75 stroke with that compression should need 25 degrees to run properly at idle with a @230 cam.

however I still need 25 BTDC on initial to even get it to run.

The issue is that the car will not idle with less than 25 deg BTDC

Just to address some of the previous comments, i never thought the car wouldn't like 25 deg as part of the tuning process, i was responding to carfreak's posts above. I've run cams like that in many short stroke small blocks and even thou they wanted more, they would run cleanly with as little as 12/14 degrees.