Not sure but I believe the 53-54's had a slightly larger oil pump and aluminium pistons. You can actually notice a difference if you port the runners and polish the exuast runners. Also clean up and match the cast iron exhuaste and intake manifold. and relieve the area around the valves and you will notice an improvement. I never won a race but she pulled alot stronger up the mountains at 5200 feet. the engineers were ultra conservative with the performance and several others were already comming out with ohv v8's. Pontiac only up the hp each year enough to brag in its brochures. Besides they were already devloping the v8 by then and towards the end the str8 established the reliability of pontiac when it came time to promote the v8. Chevy had several problems with thier v8 when it came out.
Jim Wangers stated in his book that the pontiac str8 was the standard which all GM engines were to surpass. That says alot for your str8 just the way it is. I understand that ford four cylinder race cars(model A and up) used pontiac rods. I guess thats why they were first on race day.NOT!
|