[Jeff Higgins]

Zeke, I'm with you - the full monty would be lost on me. It would take me many tires and crate motors just to get up to snuff. I would have a ball in one of these things with that good, strong, reliable, long lasting crate motor. It would still be more car than I could handle.

That said, if a guy is competing with one of these things, I guess we need to assume he has risen above our level of lowly duffer. The rest of the guys out there are going to be expecting a certain level of performance, from both driver and car, or they don't have any business being out there to begin with. So, all of that points to an at least somewhat up to spec package, which means a competitive horsepower output.

Fortunately, American V-8's, even exceedingly high performance ones, are probably the cheapest horsepower on the planet. Once you have spent the initial buy-in, feeding the beast is relatively cheap. I did this for years in drag racing, building motors for myself and my racing buddies. Big block MOPARs, by the way. Once you have the "good stuff", yearly rebuilds were dirt cheap. I kind of miss those days...