On Episode 164 of Finnegan’s Garage, Mike Finnegan and David Newbern drive Finnegan’s 1967 Pontiac Firebird to Mo’s Speed Shop in Dallas, Georgia, to tune the supercharged Big Block Chevy V8 and see how much power it produces. This is the car that we drug out of a barn next to Paradise Dragway in Georgia two years ago. Jeff Harris ran the dyno and we did very little tuning to the Quick Fuel carburetors to make the engine produce 735hp and 845 lb-ft of torque at the tires. We were stoked because this engine is a mystery to us; it was donated to Newbern by Hunter White and after eating a camshaft in the Attempted Murder Nova at Drag Week 2019, we paid a local shop to rebuild it. Unfortunately, the shop gave us zero info about the rebuild. We don’t know the cam specs, compression ratio, ring gaps etc. We don’t even know how many cubic inches the engine is or how hard we can push it. However, other than a few massive oil leaks, it did survive a road trip to Texas for a Roadkill shoot in 2020 so we are fairly certain it will live through Rocky Mountain Raceweek 2.0, if we don’t lean on it too hard.
The mystery motor is topped off with a used Blower Shop 8-71 supercharger and backed by a Yank Billet torque converter and a Gearstar Turbo 400 transmission with a Gear Vendors Underdrive/Overdrive unit. The old Dana 60 rear end has a rebuild kit and 3.73 gears from Quick Performance and the old Centerline Convo Pro wheels are wrapped in 31×16.50 Mickey Thompson ET Drag R bias ply DOT-legal racing slicks.
We have no clue how fast the car is but if it lived through a few dyno pulls then it’s got a chance of surviving a 5 day racing road trip. Wish us luck!
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Thanks for watching!
-Finnegan