[olddog]

Well since Patrick peaked my interest, I paid attention at the London Ohio Cobra show. I tried to locate the FE cars and only found 6, 8 counting two vender display cars. That is out of nearly 200 cars. Now there were a lot of cars with hoods down, so there certainly had to be more. I did see some more FE cars earlier in the week, but I didn't want to double count. I also counted 4 385 series big blocks.

I can say if you have a near stock 300 HP or less SB, they are pretty easy to tell. When you get to the engines making good power it gets very difficult to hear a difference as the power goes up. However the one thing that stuck out is the BB all had the milder sounding cams.

Why the milder cams? Well I could speculate that they just don't need them to make the power, and that is likely true. Also more cid tends to sound milder with the same cam specs, all else being equal, but remember some of the SB were bigger cid than some of the FEs.

Now not all FE's sound alike. I met a fellow with an all aluminum 460 cid FE with tunnel port heads. It had a fairly mild cam (hydraulic roller) with a C6 transmission behind it. I think it had the sweetest sound there. He showed me the dyno sheet. Practically flat torque curve around 600. Torque was only down to 550 @ 6700 rpm where they stopped at 650 Hp. It looked like it wouldn't have peaked before 7500, but that is my speculation. Torque was over 500 where they started the pull at 3000 rpm. The car is fast. Oh yea it was in an ERA too. Great guy to talk to too.