away at age 62 in the late 1980s. If he could see what he helped me to achieve, I think he would be proud.
Another person who deserves credit as one of my mentors is Dave Smith of Dave Smith Engineering. As a young Oldsmobile racer, I looked up to him; he was a high-profile, accomplished Oldsmobile racer. I can remember calling him, buying parts and asking for advice on many Olds-specific subjects that I so desperately wanted to learn about, and he always took the time to help me. I also offer this written apology for calling him and taking up way too much of his time. As a shop owner now, I know how difficult it is to spend time on the phone. He helped pave the way to my future.
A special thanks goes to my auto tech teacher Paul Reynolds and my machine shop teacher Bob Finnegan. These guys educated and molded me as a young man in high school and I always looked up to them. I was fortunate recently to have both of them visit the shop; time traveled 30 years in an instant. They were able to see what their hard work in education had created. I was also able to thank them personally, something that I had wanted to do in recent years.
F. J. Smith is another gentleman whom I always admired, respected, and wanted to be like when I read about him in the Oldsmobile in Action publications of the early 1980s. He is very well respected in the performance industry, contributing his great knowledge of race car design and safety to the SFI Foundation. Many of the chassis safety regulations that we all have to follow are the result of much of his work. He contributed a great deal to Oldsmobile racing in the 1980s when it was at an all-time high. He set many records during Oldsmobile Racing’s development years, and was a major contributor to the design of many of Oldsmobile’s racing parts and engine building methods that we all still use today.
This is my 1970 442, running low 11-second quarter-mile times and chasing the NHRA E/Stock Automatic-class World Record.
In this revised edition of Oldsmobile V-8 Engines: How to Build Max Performance, I am sharing more than 30 years of accumulated Oldsmobile knowledge to help in your Oldsmobile performance endeavors. I began working on the first edition of this book in 2008 and have learned much since then. My most popular builds are, by far, pump-gas street-driven big-block engines. So now, with this extra information, you can successfully build your own pump-gas street engine, or at least educate yourself so that an expert can build it for you properly.
This journey began for me at age 16, when I rebuilt my first 455-ci Olds engine for a 1970 Cutlass S.
I’ve never believed in following the masses; I tend to do things considered “outside the box.” In this book I explain why I do some of the things that I do and, I hope, help you to step up a notch in the Oldsmobile performance world. You may find that some of my techniques are about as far from building a small-block Chevy as you can get. I tend to go down the road less traveled, but I don’t just give good advice. I only give advice that I’ve physically proved to be good.
My goal in sharing this knowledge with Oldsmobile enthusiasts is that this book results in faster ET slips at the racetrack and more usable power on the street. I remember my early days with Oldsmobile performance and the feeling of hunger for this knowledge. I’m also here to save you from dropping your engine off at your local machine shop and having it built with conventional techniques that result in premature engine wear and ultimately engine failure. I can help you save a bunch of money, but you have to understand that high-performance Oldsmobiles are inherently more expensive to build than a Chevy or a Ford engine.
Almost every topic in this book could have a book written about it to cover every detail. Here, I share my experience in power and longevity techniques that are unique to high-performance Oldsmobiles.
My working career started on my 16th birthday, as a heliarc welder at a sheet-metal fabrication shop. Next, I worked at the Delco Products General Motors plant in Rochester, New York, for 19 years and served a five-year apprenticeship as an automation mechanic. As a journeyman automation mechanic, I worked repairing, troubleshooting, and redesigning automated equipment.
While employed at the Delco Products division of General Motors Corporation, I also worked weekends, from 1997 to 2001, as a tech official for the National Muscle Car Association (NMCA). At the time, Petersen Publishing owned NMCA, and it was best known for Hot Rod magazine. It was a great experience, flying around to races working as a tech official, writing and enforcing rules, and helping host the events. During that time, I became race director for the brand-new (at that time) National Mustang Racers Association (NMRA) and was one of the people who helped get that organization started on the right foot.
When I first started at Delco Products in 1986, fewer than 4,000 people worked there. Around the turn of the century, I noticed that there was a mass exodus of manufacturing plants from the United States, headed for Mexico. Our plant was sending manufacturing assembly lines there one by one. In 2003, the building had a lot of empty space and only about 1,200 people were employed there. That was enough to show where it was all heading. So, in 2004, I decided to leave factory life and start my own business, which is now known as BTR Performance. If you ever visit my facility, you’ll see evidence of my CNC machine background throughout the shop. I even have a CNC machine from the old plant. I believe that meticulous machining techniques and precise tolerance control are the foundation for all brands of high-performance engines.
By the early 1990s, I had the car running within a few hundredths of the national record. I attended a few NHRA divisional points meets, but quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. Even if I could set the record, low-11-second ETs just were not going to cut it for me, having raced my street-driven 1970 Cutlass with nitrous oxide and run 9-second ETs. Some friends from the Chicago area (including Mike Glasby, Chuck Samuel, Nick Scavo, and Ronnie Mroz) were racing in the newly formed NMCA and I really liked the heads-up–style drag racing, where the fastest guy was to have the advantage! This was for me.
I first started racing the street-legal drag racing scene in what was called the EZ Street class at NMCA in 1996. I ran my red (formerly white) 442-ci, DX-based, small-block 1970 Cutlass. I had fun and turned a best of 9.41 in the class, which was very respectable for that time. But, I knew that racing a 3,800-pound car was not going to do the job, so I set out to build the 1978 Olds Starfire. I knew it would be light, and designed the combination to run into the high 8s at 150 mph, never even considering that the car would eventually run in the high 7s at more than 175 mph.
My original combination for this EZ Street class (at the lighter weight) was a flat-tappet, 337-ci Oldsmobile DX-based small-block with cast-iron Batten heads and a single-stage nitrous plate. This combination was competitive in 2003, going a best of 8.70 at 157 mph, but by this time participation in the EZ Street class that I built the car around had begun to dwindle. 2004, I built a new 403-ci, NASCAR block-based small-block Olds engine, and set the car up to race in the National Street Car Association (NSCA) Limited Street class. I was successful at setting the Limited Street record at 7.90 seconds at 175 mph and winning two consecutive National Championships (2005 and 2006). In 2007, I decided to compete in the NMCA’s no-wheelie-bar Xtreme Street class. Since the start of competition, the Starfire always qualified on top of the ladder and set the national record in 2009 with a 7.97-second pass at 172 mph.
This Oldsmobile Starfire set another NMCA Extreme Street record in 2010; it ran a personal best 7.85 at 175 mph, 3,035 pounds. It continued to win races until I retired the car at the end of the 2012 season.
During
