Camaro site debates mopar vs chevy
I streetraced Chevies in the 80's to pay for my Mopars. That's what you do with a good work mule to support the nice ponies!
Mopars ran longer and didn't require as much crazy stuff that the chevy did, BUT... The Mopars were at least 3 times as expensive to put together. How many BB Mopars back then turned much more than 6500, NOT MANY. My BB chevies saw 8500 sometimes. BB chevies eat flat tappet cams like babies drink formula. They didn't blow up, but, they wore out quickly. I usually offed them before they blew.
I had a friend that owned a nice 70 SS 454 LS6 Chevelle, 4.10 auto car with a converter, built it up pretty nice. Raced him with my stockish, suspension worked, 6 pack 70 GTX with decent tires and 4.56's. He was stunned that I was right on his door or 1/4 panel until about 1000'. Only then did that Chevelle start to pull away
Going to a swap meet was easy, you could trip over rect port alum BB Chevy heads and the only Mopar heads were cast iron stuff.
People that are caught up on one make are really missing out on some great iron. I like all the makes, had nice chevies, ford, whatever, I prefer Mopars.
Amen to that, i remember those days, your right about the chevy's eating cam lobes, but they would run, another screamer was the 70 454 Stingray, with slicks & some tuneing, it would run 11.0s, pretty damn quick for a street car in 1970.
Mopars were always cool, there sound, there graphics, there wild paint, these young guys need to understand, if it wasn't for Chrysler being the underdog of the 3, you wouldn't have all these cool Mopars, they did anything to boost sales, some times it work, most of the time it didn't. I also miss the smell of the interiors back then, not anymore, when you sat in a Mopar, you knew it was a mopar, same with the GMs & fords, those were the days.
For the comments on HP ratings on the hemi, those high HP hemi's were the single carb'd engines back around 64-65, there were 3 stages of them if memory serves me, there was a "stage 1", "stage 2", & "stage 3", but they all had 1 carb & were primarily a race engine, then the Hemi came back in 1970 as the 2 4 brrl. 425hp street hemi, i'm sure it made alittle more, but not much, because it was a more streetable Hemi with less compression & cam, i personally think the 2 4 set-up was a sales pitch, & it worked for the most part, the 454s were under-rated too, especially the LS7, they stayed conservative on the HP ratings because the government was cracking down "hard" by this time, but the public still wanted HP & big cubes, they dropped the Hemi after 1971 as not to kill a good thing with lower compression, & a slug, the 440s & 340s fell on there knee's in 72, & the rest is history, the new line in 71 was the 360 & 400 smoggers, by 74, the 440 was a true pig.