A "Smog Dog" that can be a tiger with a little work.....

Had a couple inquiries from people wanting to possibly do Ford projects. One guy wanted to do a '74-76 Torino in "Starsky and Hutch" style, and the other guy wanted to do a 71-72 LTD in "White Lightning" style. Both of them had been told that if they wanted real power they'd have to swap in a 460. ( I love the "experts" that give advice like this who have never worked as a mechanic or owned or built a race car or project of any kind, but give other people advice on how to spend their money ). Not true. I told them-as I've said in earlier posts-the 400C used from 1971 on and the 351 / 400M used from 1975-82 can make plenty of power with very little work. If you read the "Engine Masters Challenge" every year there's always someone with a 400 Ford making over 500 hp. If you think about it-regardless of brand name anything 400 cubes should make decent power and torque. Anyhow-the reason they got a reputation as "dogs" in the '70's was threefold. They were only available with two-barrel carburation,single exhaust and a lazy cam. And fourth they usually had salt-flats gearing like 2.80:1 or 3.00:1. An Edelbrock Performer intake and matching Carb and a set of headers ( or even just adding a good dual exhaust sytem behind the stock manifolds ) will REALLY wake up one of these engines like you won't believe. You'll think you dropped in a 460 with just these two simple mods. Why? It's all about airflow. Now it's breathing like it should. A 400 V8 with a 2bbl carb and single exhaust is like a 250 lb man trying to run while breathing through a straw! The other big things that are easy is an axle-ratio change. Swapping the 2.80:1 gears for something in the 3.23:1-3.73:1 range will cut your 0-60 and 1/4 mile time by 1/2 a second and not hurt drivability too much. The other thing would be putting a shift improver kit in the trans. B&M and TransGo both offer excellent shift kits that will give automatic kick down to low gear under 15 mph and much firmer full-throttle shifts. These simple mods will give your "Gator" or "Starsky" car or "Muscle Truck" more than enough oomph to do smoky burnouts and back up the image. If you want to go faster than that-Edelbrock and Trick Flow offer performance aluminum heads for these engines and Edelbrock,Crane,Lunati and Competition Cams all offer cam kits from mild to wild. So if you have or want to buy a Torino, Montego, Cougar, Ranchero or F150 or Bronco that has one of these engines-no you don't need to spend megabucks swapping in a 460. You can make plenty of hp and torque with very little investment. A friend of mine had a Bronco and he was blown away by the improvement in performance simply by adding headers and the Performer Carb and intake. It had way more power and got better gas mileage even pulling his boat! So trust me....Not some yahoo working at Wal-Mart....Mastermind