'Which is probably why Wally Booth eventually ran a Hornet in Pro Stock.'
That, and the Hornet was much more slippery in high speed air........... ......we actually ended up with a Booth-Arons engine in the home race car at one time. A 356 inch engine that came out of one of the Hornets. At the time 780 hp. @ 9000 rpm. Man those ports were freakin' huge and heads were half glue and brass. Pop went to Detroit a coupla times around '74 to meet Wally and tour the shop. After he came back he was a changed man, the head work then became MUCH more radical and why the cars suddenly went much faster. We were head grinding fools back then, Sears was warrantying Craftsman tool and die grinders for us at the rate of one like every 27 minutes back then. I still have 3 or 4 of them laying around that I subconsciously reach for when I see a bare unmolested head, it seems to be a mental disease I now have had for some 40 years. I keep hearing Oscar Goldman say 'we can make him (it) BETTER than he was before!'..........LOL.
390 AMC HOT?? I don't think so. They barely cracked 320 hp. The BIG key that everyone else missed was the TORQUE output (425 ft.lbs. for a 390), look at the specs of the day, the AMC engines made far more torque size for size than other engines did. As anyone who plays with engines knows, you can make big hp. from big torque, not the other way around. The biggest hottest fatblocks from GM and Mopar only made 450 ft.lbs. Pop saw that back then and the game was on. We blew away Mopar 440s by the droves as well as true 426 Hemi cars, 427, 428, 429 Ford (sorry guys) as well. Many of those were wrapped by big body boat anchor cars, the AMX then bumped the equivalent of another 50 hp. simply by virtue of its' low weight. With the stock leaf/link suspension they had we didn't even use traction devices, you could flip one upside down in a wheelie with none at all. The cars launched so hard you saw stars from blood draining from your head. The engines are a piece of cake to make 500 hp. with, we had a full bodied street 390 running in the tens with mufflers. No one could touch it on the street, we drove it to the track and bumped off trailered race cars as well.
I remember calling my brother over to look at the inside guts of a 440 Mopar back in the day and remarking "No wonder they're so damn slow, it takes another one hundred horsepower just to rotate the crank and rods in these....the freakin' pistons are gallon syrup buckets" then we both broke out laughing. Those were some great days and at the time I did not know how lucky I was to get to play with all that stuff.
No, never saw the turboed Gremlin, but we looked at those who swapped other engines into AMCs as sacrilegious, or, they weren't smart enough to make the AMC engine work. The thinking of the times and most certainly no inflection or insult intended to your friend. You gotta be pretty damn smart to run twin turbo and not melt pistons all day long. To each his own. I look at the AMC stuff as a teaching aid, we learned that all engines are the same but each has its' good points, you learn to look for those to exploit when you play with a new one. After the AMCs it was not hard to build six and seven hundred horse BBCs and we certainly did plenty of those as well. Some quite a bit higher, the pro stock engines made like 1500 hp.
Sorry, I have digressed off the topic like usual......... .........
