Drag Race
If you are driving down the highway in an older car, you are at a major disadvantage if you have to make a quick stop. Many of the high-performance cars being built today have fantastic stopping power, and if you can’t stop as well as the car in front of you, that could certainly be a big problem. The owner of this ’55 Chevy improved it with front disc brakes that work well, but he wanted the Chevy to stop even better, so he decided to add rear disc brakes.
If you have spent any amount of time working on street machines, you are well aware that “bolt-on” parts do not always bolt right on. Still, it’s often a lot easier to modify those parts than to fabricate your own. The same holds true for such items as rollcages. Nobody pretends that a prefab cage is going to drop right into place without having to trim a single tube. That’s mainly because the economies of scale dictate that manufacturers make a single design fit as many cars as possible. Unfortunately, a cage that fits many cars probably fits no car perfectly.
Okay, we weren’t quite that naive about what we read regarding upgrading to 1.6 rockers on our small-block Chevy for the first time, but it was close.
The engine in question was a decent runner with 30,000 miles on the mild-performance rebuild. The rebuilt engine was purchased used, and among its selling points were 0.030-over 9.5:1 pistons, moly rings, 1.5 roller rockers, a Performer RPM intake and a brand-new Holley 750cfm carburetor. The cam wasn’t a perfect match to the torque converter used in the previous installation nor was the final-drive gear ratio. As a result, the owner planned on stepping down on the cam chart to a Comp 286H-10 cam, which came with the engine in its original box. Also included were a brand-new factory Z28 oil pan and a factory timing chain cover to replace the cheap chrome pieces. For $300, the engine package was a deal, and one we couldn’t pass up. We sold the aforementioned chrome pieces and matching valve covers for $50, getting us the engine at the bargain price of $250, and we still had the new cam and lifters on our shelf.
In the eyes of the Chevy enthusiast, ultimate acceleration reigns supreme. Everything plays second fiddle in the performance-oriented minds of many enthusiasts, including handling, comfort and so on—besides, those things are tough to quantify. Acceleration and top speed are what we are into and unfortunately, all too often, last on the performance priority list is braking. Remember, no matter how quick or fast a particular Chevy is, and no matter how well that Bow Tie handles, no matter how plush it is, no matter how straight the body panels are or how crafty it’s built, eventually you have to get the thing to stop.
What makes more power: carburetors or computers? While the ultimate answer is that a sophisticated electronic fuel-injection system will virtually always outpower a carburetor, the real question may be whether the power gains are worth the extra expense and complexity of installing an EFI system.
Wheel choice is probably the single biggest factor in determining the direction of your project. Just as the thought of installing stock steel wheels on anything other than a restoration seems absurd, the idea of installing race-styled wheels on a restoration may be just as absurd. Or is it?
You can’t throw a stone these days without hitting an aftermarket aluminum cylinder head. They perform as good or better than anything the factories put out, and then some. They are much lighter than iron heads, and they’re now extremely affordable. Thanks to competition in the aftermarket, it could easily be said that for the performance and price benefits of a new set of aluminum heads, why would anyone bother refurbishing a set of iron castings?
