Re: 359 intake/exhaust

Posted by humanpotatohybrid On 2023/12/29 12:54:29

Have you considered just doing a V-8 swap at this point? 🤔

"Packard" and "Performance" share little aside from their first letter. Really the only thing able to put down remotely impressive numbers would be a 55-56 manual Clipper Custom, which are/were actually quite competitive in performance with the Corvette and T-bird, but even those are slow compared to today's cars.

The 55 T-bird has a 0-60 of around 8.9 sec whereas my 5000 lb Toyota Highlander Hybrid crossover barely in the mid 200's HP puts down 7.3 sec. A contemporary road test put the 55 Custom with UM at 11.9 sec since flooring it in an UM will keep you in converter drive probably through the whole run, wasting lots of power. I'm sure a manual would be quicker in the right hands.

Obviously the point here is that the flathead 8 engines are even weaker and less responsive. I just make sure you know what you're (not really) getting into in terms of performance gains. Though good, powerful engines for their time, these were not meant to be performance engines nor performance cars.