Old Race Parts and Pieces

[Dan Bennett]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lee

AMC NASCAR cylinder heads
These have production casting number on them. These are unused, semi-finished as delivered. Ultra rare. I can't use them in Stock Eliminator but I can use them for Super Stock but it would take a lot of filling to have the proper specs. These will outflow & out perform modern Indy heads. You should pray I never have need to run these in SS!

Sorry, no pictures to share but a story I found pretty interesting.

Way back in my Pro Stock days, I had a conversation with Richard Maskin and was asking about the famous Hornet PS.

Remember that the head rules were pretty restrictive when the X was being raced; you had to use a stock head for at least your base but could cut and weld fairly freely.

I told Maskin I'd seen the heads at a race when they were running the valves in the pits and was amazed at the amount of work that had to have gone into them. I remember thinking these were Frankenheads for sure, with all the scars and welds.

He laughed and agreed that they were a total pain to create. But he was laughing because after the first pair or two, the heads weren't what they seemed. It turns out that since Maskin had access to a foundry, he decided just to have the heads poured in the altered configuration.

He told me that they had to do a LOT of work on the heads to reproduce the "welds", "cuts", and "modifications". Though they never got caught, he said he wasn't sure that he saved all that much time over chopping up factory heads.

Successful drag racers are always thinking.