Cross-breeding is alright if it's "Period Correct"......And not desecrating a rare classic!!..

Saw an article in Hot Rod Deluxe magazine about a guy who got a great "barn find" in the midwest. He bought a '57 Chevy Gasser that had always been a drag racer and had always been Pontiac powered. The second owner had bought it used about 1962, and installed a straight front axle,moved then engine back several inches for better traction,radiused the fenderwells for big slicks and installed a blown 389 Pontiac engine and a B&M Hydro tranny.  The car won many races for several years and when the engine blew the owner upgraded to a 421 Pontiac with a GMC blower on it. He eventually sold the car in 1978 to a guy who raced it until 1985-when the B&M hydro finally let go. He installed a 400 Pontiac engine and a TH400 out of a wrecked GTO and raced it some more. He sold the car to someone else who put it his barn and never really did anything with it. Fast-forward to 2015-and the guy advertised the car for sale. A bunch of purists turned up their noses because of the modified body and the Pontiac powertrain. The guy who did buy it remembered the car as an absolute terror on the strip and realized he had a piece of history. He's going to freshen up the paint-and try to get a replacement blower for the Pontiac engine-he's going to keep it as it was raced it's entire life. I think that's really cool rather than spending 100k plus trying to put it back to "original". A lot of people are screaming blasphemy right now-but hot rodding at it's core involved cross-breeding. If your old enough-or have a dad or uncle old enough-you know that a lot of guys put small-block Chevys into '32 Fords. I mentioned in an earlier post that a popular swap was putting a Cadillac V8 into a Studebaker Coupe. I knew a guy back in the '70's who had a badass '55 Ford F100. He'd put a Chevelle front clip on it which allowed him to have front disc brakes and power steering, and allowed him to install a snarling 427 Chevy Rat motor and a B&M prepped TH400. This monster knocked down high 11s and low 12s regularly depending on whether he smoked the tires halfway down the strip or all the way down the strip. Ford guys would cheer him at the drags until they came into the pits and saw that it was powered by a-gasp! Chevy!. I've seen El Caminos with 400 Pontiacs in them, a Tempest with a 425 Olds V8, a Cutlass with a 454 Chevy, and a Buick Skylark with a 400 Chevy Small-block. Sometimes you have a car laying around and an engine laying around, and you think-"Hey-this thing could really run for almost no investment other than time." There's nothing wrong with that-except like I cited the Hot Rod article where both musclecar guys and import tuners wanted to storm the guys house with torches-this schmuck put the engine and tranny out of a 1998 Turbo Toyota Supra into a '67 Camaro!-effectively butchering not one, but two classics. Like I've said before if you want to put an LS engine in a beater Tempest or Cutlass go ahead and enjoy it-just don't do it to a numbers-matching GTO or 442!! Put a Coyote into any beater Mustang of your choosing-just don't do it to a Boss 302!!  I have a 428 Pontiac engine in my garage. I'd love to find a '71-77 Pontiac Ventura to put it in and make a stompin' drag racer-( a Ventura is about 600 lbs lighter than a '70's Firebird ). But....that engine would just as easily go into a Nova or Olds Omega or Buick Apollo of the same vintage and go just as fast. And it wouldn't offend anybody-you don't hear of people fighting with machetes for pristine '73 Omegas too often!  Just a thought. Mastermind