What's the bottleneck in my engine?

[Mr.Fixit]

Your vic jrintake is the one you should be running. The dual plane edelbrocks run out of mustard on stroker SB's at too low an RPM. The vic jr heads don't have enough velocity, found more torque and HP with ported RPM heads. Everybody says "bigger cam" not me. You have heads that flow decent with good velocity, and a tiny cam can make great HP. .544 lift is not insufficient.

You have come pretty good for your first attempt at a parts combo in a stroker SB. The next 100 HP take a lot of R&D in specific parts combos, unless you have a small fortune to waste, you need to go with somebody else's combo, which they don't give away like a free recipe. It's the accumulation of a lot of tiny little things from this point on, no one thing will bump your numbers up to what you want. +3 +5 +10 keep making tiny gains and that how you get to the big numbers. You do have: really light pistons, long con rods, knife edged ultralight crank, well fitted crank scraper and windage screen, stud girdles so you get all the numbers your cam card says you should instead of deflection, a well worked on carb not just out of the box with different jets and power valve, fresh performance valve job on the heads right as they came out of the box, headers made for your engine not just generic fitsd SB fords in this chassis headers, etc, etc, right? You can find some more power with a different cam, I can't tell you which, slight differences in what your bottom end has and what we used to use do make a big difference.