[Tom Wells]

Interesting thread.

It might be instructive to ask what txcobra's car weighs with 1/2 tank of fuel and the driver installed.

I have two sorta similar cars, each weighing about 3200 lbs. Both use a C-6 automatic with a 2.46 first gear and 1600 rpm (pretty low) stall speed converters. The automatic is a difference; txcobra's 3.27 first gear might be similar overall.

My Cobra has a 2.88 and the other car uses a 2.75 axle. The engines are, um, a bit bigger: 521 and 557 respectively and are quite mild with hydraulic rollers and 9.8:1 compression. They have between them about 50K miles of hard street use with lots of track time at road race venues such as Sebring.

Each has over 400hp at the back tires giving tire-shredding capability from a dead stop up to whenever I let up using street tires - track tires seem to stop spinning at about 50-70mph thank goodness.

Torque curves are wide, flat and high, getting to about 500 foot pounds at the flywheel not long after 2500 rpm occurs, and keeping that level to above 5000.

I'd predict that on the street, if txcobra's car isn't too heavy, it will be fine.

The 385 can be built to produce a bunch of torque over a wide range with lots down low if needed. Unless it will be a race car I'd suggest going for mid-range torque (say 3000-4000 rpm) so the car can be tamer going away from a dead stop. If the red line is 5800-6000 rpm, the car will still run away from almost anything, easily.

Tom