marky mark

Which is more powerful, all things being equal? I use the 440 instead of the 426 Hemi because from what I've heard the 440 was more streetable and could keep up with the Hemi,up to a point anyway. Has anyone had experience with a Roadrunner, GTX, Cuda,Charger or Challenger with one of these 440's?

Just curious as to what was the "King of the Hill" back in the Muscle Car era.

Merry Christmas,

Mark :flag :chevy

mountainmotor

The 440's would beat the Big Block Chevy's near every time.The 10.5.1 383's would also but so would a hard hitting LT1!Biggest thing back in the "days" the Big Block guys did wrong would put headers and 4.56 gears under them and think they had race cars which effectivley kept them out of their power range.Then the 80,s came and the aftermarket started with better cams,intake heads ect now the Big Chevy is King!But they have some nice parts available for the Mopars also.
To answer your question about king of the hill back then.Mopar engineered their cars to move on the street where most of the racing was done.


[Modified by mountainmotor, 3:00 AM 12/24/2001]

Les

mountainmotor,
Good observations. The problem for Mopars in past years has been the lack of good aftermarket heads- until recently now that Edelbrock makes some nice BB Mopar heads. Their stock heads just don't flow like a good set of Chevy BB heads. My neighbor, a good buddy of mine, has a healthy 440 (w/ stock heads) in his Super Bee w/ very similar mods to my 439. He's running 3.90s w/ a beefed auto. His ETs are very low 13s w/ one 12.98 and trap speeds around 103. I haven't run w/ my latest mods yet but w/ stock intake & hood I ran a 12.41 last time out w/ a low(for me) trap speed of 109+ due to 2 burned plug wires forcing me to shift early in all gears to avoid a miss. My best trapspeed was 112.5 MPH which I hope to destroy next time out.
Even accounting for about a 200 lb. weight penalty he's still clearly down on power by comparison. He's raced alot more than I have and has his ignition & carb pretty much optimized, so the difference is in the internals. I just hope he doesn't step up to aftermarket heads some day cuz I know he'll be knocking at my door if he does.
FYI I'm running a fairly mild Crower hydraulic flat tappet cam w/ shiftpoint of 6000 RPMs.

Tim H

Chevrolet is KING,face it,I did and saw the light!

mrvette

I remember the HEMI as allways KING, damn thing could/did outrun anything out there, all it needed was a cam and headers....headers were shipped in some cars from the factory....the cam was up to the owner to install himself....and they were available,,...nice 1200 rpm idle and all, just as 'tame' as a wildcat.....they might not have been the quickest things off the line, but good GOD allmighty would they run HARD on the top end....

GENE

Barry's70LT1

Got time for a couple more stories ?
A follow up to what Mountainmotor was saying.

In the summer of '70, I had a '69 Camero with a "warmed up" 350.
"151"cam & headers, and reworked Qjet.
My buddy had a '68 Roadrunner, 383, with some head work done.
We did a lot of street racing. When we ran together, we always ran
dead even in the 1/4. Side by side all the way.

One Saturday he was extremely anxious to run. We did, and I
beat him by two car lengths. After 3 or 4 runs, I always beat him by
two lengths.
Then he admitted he had switched gears from 3.23 to 3.91.

He then went home and we helped him switch back to the 3.23.
Only took an hour.
We ran again, and we were even in the 1/4 again.

He had too much gear for his combination.
I guess the moral of this story is a "correct combination" will beat
bolt on's if they are not done with some thought.

Barry

MotorHead

I had a '70 383 Cuda that would blow the doors off my Vette however when the Vette gets it's 383 there will be a different story

Don't actuallly know if this helps but back then Mopar was King , there were however some nice Chevy's and Ford's, small block Z28 302 and Boss 302 and of course the BB 427 I could go ...... :D

But it was hard to beat a 440 Six Pack not to mention the Hemi. :crazy:


[Modified by MotorHead, 10:18 AM 12/24/2001]

gkull

I have owned two Mopars. The 383 magnum in my 71 Sattelite sebring was a hot rod. all stock it was a real tire smoker. Of course tires weren't as good back then. My 67or 68 Charger R/T 440 was big heavy pig tank of a car. Real high top speed for it's day. But it takes lot's of power to get 4500+ pound cars moving.

If you take all the muscle cars and factory hp ratings. Just factor in the weight of the car and how bad the handling really was.

I think that the hottest car "stock" that I ever drove was the 69 427/435 hp or maybe something your not familiar with 69 W30 455 olds Cutlass supreme. My Dad bought it new when I was first driving.

My vote for stock would probably be the Olds then Vette Pontiac's have had some really hot rods in the GTO's starting withe the 389 tripowers. Ford's have always been on top with 390/427-429's.

bence13_33

I asked my dad the same question not too long ago, he has owned:

440 '68 Charger R/T
427 Tri-Power '69 Corvette
454 '72 Chevelle

I asked him which engine had the performance advantage STOCK for STOCK. He said that his Charger was quick, but pretty much any stock 427 around that time would have spanked it. He said that the 396 Chevy's were a better match for the 440. Obviously once you start adding aftermarket parts the sky is the limit. The high point that Mopar always had was the Hemi, there wasn't too much that was going to touch a Hemi (even to this day)...

My dad also told me that the funnest car he had was the Charger, the most comfortable car to drive was the Chevelle and the meanest car was the 427 tri-power 'Vette. :chevy

Tim H

The 69 W-30 only had a 400 unless it was a Hurst Olds then it had the 455.
Somebody might of transplanted a 455 but not from the factory.
It was the old GM A-body cubic inch to weight thing restriction.

mountainmotor

This is a fun topic.Those were the days when Supertuning was very effective and keeping those cars tuned up was a chore.When you here a guy say he smoked a real L88 with his Boss 302 he probably left out the part about the Chevy was loaded up and running on 6 cylinders ect.
One of the worst stompings I saw was a well prepared 67 Chevelle with the real 375 hp 396 and 4.11 gear w/4spd.Some new guys showed up in a near new 72 455 GTO 4spd and thumped the 396 with the a/c on and did not get out of 3rd gear in the 1/4.
I have owned many Mopars and my favorite and fastest was a 68 Road Runner 383"was 10.5-1 that year" w/3.55 gear and 4spd.It got 17 mpg at a steady 55 mph.Mods were headers,dual point and carbed leaned out .
I had a 68 RT Charger that at 4200lbs was anything but quick .A tire smoking 14.87 was it's best @ 104mph? but let me catch you at 40 mph and you just got burned!
Then a guy with a little 71 Duster with 340 auto and 3.23 gears got turned onto a new thing called a stall speed converter.He put 3.55 gears in it and some little cheater slicks and left so hard the biggest motored cars could not catch him.Cheater! He He!
A really neat thing I saw was a 72 Datsun PU with a powerglide 456 gear and a stock LT1 out of a 70 1/2 Camaro.He really put it on a Baldwin Motion Camaro!
The funnest car I have driven to date though with exeption to a turbocharged Miata was my friends 70 1/2 Camaro Z28.4spd,4.11 gear it just seemed to do everything just right exept cruise on the hiway at 80!The contolled powerslides were unbelievable.

Mac

The thing I find funny is there are some people who believe passionately that their make or model was the dominate motor when, realistically, there were cars from every make and manufactor which were hot. Once they hit the market and the grease monkeys and hot rodders got their hands on them, they were even faster. I think blanket statements like "insert favorite car were the hottest cars of all time" are ridiculous.

Over the years, I've seen the most unlikely cars hotrodded. I saw a Pontiac Acadian which turned the quarter mile faster than most Vettes would, including mine, but he paid the price; a full roll cage doesn't make for a comfy cruiser. One project I was involved in was a 67 Cuda with a 440/4 speed/4.11s set for dragging. It was amazing how hard this car launched and we were headed for the full roll cage route but the owner decided he could drive better than the driver. He floated the valves on his first run, quickly ended the season.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that any well tuned combination will work and it's naive to say 440s will beat 427s and 426 hemi's will beat them all. Just my humble opinion.

Merry Christmas and Happy Belated Hanuhkah

SBR

IMHO that a well tuned Hemi Dart was the King of all musclecars, the L88s were a close second.

mountainmotor

When Chrysler designed the 354 that lead to the 426 with the Hemispherical combustion chamber I doubt they knew that the basic design would eventually get fuel cars into the 4 second quarter mile
They offer crate motors now and I bet they are tough to get to run on pump gas with a simalar prepped BB Chevy do to the combustion chamber design.They needed high octane then.I bet they need high octane now.
More of the actual racers and plain Lake Racers are changing back to the Hemi in their boats now that they are available again .They love high static compression with a blower to push methanol through with.

LS1-Corvette00

As the former owner of a Fast Big Block Mopar car and a kid who grew up
with "Nuttin but Mopars" I have to say that Mopar's Big Blocks tend to whup
up on the BBC's most of the time.

Dad raced NED for 18 or so years with one of 50 factory 1968 Hemi Baracuda
SS/AA Super Stockers. These records still stand mostly today as dominated
by the Mopars.

IMHO I doubt you will ever see a 4.60 second BBC or atleast nothing that
even "resembles" a BBC.. If you look at the ARIAS and KB Hemi blocks that
are run in T/F you will see that aside from additional material here and there,
these blocks bare much resemblance to the original hemi's even to the point
where the KB Blocks proudly display " C H R Y S L E R" across the side. And
the ARIAS Heads can even be had with street hemi accesory bolt holes!

My car was a 1971 Dodge Demon that was Pro Street'd and it was mild by
all means. I ran a 1972 J440 Block punched 0.060 over (452 CID) with a
set of Mopar LY Rods swinging on a Cross Drilled HP Crank topped off with
10.5:1 TRW Powerforged flat tops (no valve releifs) the heads were Mopar
906 castings with mild port work and a large exhaust valve, 3 angle and
Crane Double Springs. Intake was Weiand Team-G Track Ram and caburation
was Holley 1050 CFM 3BBL (off a 454 Baldwin Motion Phase III Camaro)

Ignition was MSD 6-AL coupled with an Accel 50KV Supercoil, 300+ Race
Wires and a Mopar Performance Mechanical Advance,Mechanical Tach Drive
Breakerless Distrib. Exhaust went out via 2 1/4" primary 4" collector fender
well, slip tube Hooker Supercomps and the cam was Mopar's 509 Purpleshaft.

In street trim with a 3.91 gear this was an 11.40 car without breaking a
sweat. More gear (4.56:1) and more stall (4K) could have taken the car into
the high 10's without a doubt in my mind.. And this was no high dollar car
by any means..

The Pill I ran in the 6-AL was 7K and this Big Block routinely saw that.. I would
be afraid to do the same with a BBC without serious work, and 7K in a Pontiac? No way.. (you don't need to take a Poncho that high I guess)

Edzred72

You ain't a lie-yn. A buddy of mine had one back in the early 70's and nothing could touch him! I ran a 340 Challenger back then with 3 angle valve seats, valve springs, hydrol cam, edelbrock torker, 650 Holly DP, breathing through Hooker's.. 323 gear... and let me tell ya.. I took down quite a few small block camaro's and f-birds. I even whooped a 396 Camaro.. but that was due to driving skills.. not pure HP. Man that was fun back then... Mopar was king.. for a while

gerry c

Speaking of Hemi's

Really due tothe design of the Hemi, you could run LOWER octane rated fuel then in a non-hemi of the same compression ratio. This is due to the better flame travel a hemi head allows.

In about 1973 I picked up for an unbelievable $2000 a 1967 GTX with the 426 Hemi. This car had only 20K miles on it and even had plastic mats on the floor to protect the carpet..... 100% stock. With the then "high performance" Positraction tires from Inglewood Tire (anyone else remember those?) and 3.26 gears in back, from a stoplight you could lay two nice lines over 60 feet in length. This car had a 150 mph speedo which could be buried. According to the tach it ran about 170. Nothing stock could touch it and only something heavily modified could.

No other car took as much work to keep running right though. New plugs wires all the time until I put on the then "new" silcon wires. Pull the power brake booster to set valve lash (every 5K miles). New plugs everytime to adjusted the valves. In general a pain in the rear. This was a dailey driver mind you, not a weekend play-toy. I admit, I butchered the car by cutting open the wheel openings in back to through on larger tires (they did help).

As for other "lesser" MOPARS, I did not and do not think much of them. The Buick GS-455's would whup on them most times, and some Olds and Pontiac's would also. The Chevy big blocks were for the most part over rated then. The biBB's gained most of their fame in vette's, but the BB was designed to be a TRUCK motor but with the few large port heads they were really hot. But with the heads that were most used, they were pretty much behind compared to the 455 offered by the other GM divisions. Another thing many younger people do not know is that all of the 455's were different designs and not all the same basic engine. Back then every GM division made its own engines and about the only sharing was the chevy inline 6 and before
that the samll v8 Buick and Olds shared. Engines were not "corporate"

BubbaJJ

Check out the latest Car Craft. They did a buildup of a Buick 455, Chrysler 440, Chevy 454, olds and pontiac 455, and a ford 460. The buick beat em all but had a set of very expensive aftermarket heads. the rest were pretty much even. It's a neat article that compares a simular buildup of each. They all made over 500HP except for the olds which made just a shade under.

LS1-Corvette00

GerryC,

"Lesser Mopars" Excuse me?

I love the Hemi and I think the design revolutionized the engine industry
in general. The same design principal can be found today in everything
from Ferrari's to Civics.

But from a performance point of view I have to say that the 440-6 Can
and will run with a 426 "street" Hemi. Of course the Race Hemi's were
a whole diffrent ballgame, but unless you paid 10-15K for a factory
Super Stocker (which was equal to 60K with today's cost of living) you
were not getting THE baddest Elephant.

Being that I grew up with a dad who raced SS cars and friends of his
who also raced SS I can tell you the Wedges were not and ARE not
slouches. A friend has to Super-E wedge cars that would send a street
Elephant home crying.


And I will most defiantly agree with you that the Buick 455's flew.. The GSX
was one of the FEW cars that did run 12.30's out of the box. An LS6 Velle
wouldn't come close, not down a mineshaft and not with a rocket straped to
the rear bumper!

:D

soundguy

>>Over the years, I've seen the most unlikely cars hotrodded.

Anybody remember the Rambler 'Scrambler'? I used to run my GTO at a track in Spokane, WA back in the 70s and a buddy of mine had a cousin who drove one. It was shaped kinda like a 64-65 Chevelle and had an AMC 390 4bbl in it. He was able to turn high 12s. (my GTO (400 4bbl) would only do low 14s so I avoided running heads-up with him...bad enough to get stomped by a Ford or Mopar...no way I wanted to lose to a Rambler!!! :) )