Derby engine round two
 

Ok, we're stepping it up a little this year with our outlaw car. Some of you may remember we ran a freshened up 350 with the standard bolt ons from Edelbrock last year. Well, this year we're running that motor in a chain up car and the outlaw is getting a total work over. What we've got is a 3/4 ton suburban 2x4 with a 454 that we are grafting our existing outlaw car onto. We've already got the frame shortened, started stuffing and boxing the frame.

So the question is, what kind of build would you do on a 454 to push around 11-12k lbs of steel around in the dirt? Should I go for torque, or make it scream and throw some gears in the rear end? Cooling is not really an issue, we have that covered.

Opinions and ideas welcome....

Low end grunt!

flip the full float 14 bolt over for 3 reverse gears, add some 6.13 or deeper gears...put a huge tranny cooler in a cooler full of ice...i would go for reliability before huge power cause with huge power comes huge heat and that makes the car harder to start...dual plane intake, mid sized 4 barrel carb, a good tune up goes a long way....

bypass the solinoid on the chevy starter and put a ford stater soloniod on it. i do this on ours, no more hard starter slow crank issues. well, not till it gets really hot.

OK, so I'm leaning towards a torque monster build. What kind of pistons/ compression and which stock heads would be a good setup for a low revver with lots of snap?

in all the durby cars we run around here we have been building the motors to scream and run low gears, i would build the motor to hit its peak around 4k and run 3k stall, i would shoot for 11 to1, and port the stock heads, mabe 1.6 roller rockers for the top

Well so much for our outlaw car!! They just changed the rules to a limited weld class after telling us this year would still be outlaw. I don't know what we're gonna do for that derby now, not really enough time to build a cheater limited weld this late in the game. We still have our other class cars to finish. I wish these derby's would just have one set of rules and stick with it.