Been discuseed here before I think. WOndering what is most you picked up with nothing but cam swap.

Most of time I have found veryi little. I did swap out what was a hot street cam for one more suited to race car back when I had my 66 Nova and I picked up right at .2 in 1/8.Like I said it was from street cam to more of race cam.

a-b-a picked up .1

The cam grind would have to be significant to see a huge change. I hear people asking about street cams all the time. They give a bunch of grinds to compare and really, they're all similar enough that one isn't much better than the other.

A good example of a huge gain is an LS cam swap. Compare a stock cam to a performance one. A simple cam swap can gain 100-150 HP with nothing more than a cam swap however comparing each cam shows huge improvements. Now comparing similar performance cams and the gains change very little between each one. The can is just part of the whole combination.

A race car however is designed for all out performance so swapping cams that also needs better heads isn't going to be much of a change because the car usually already has better heads.

A head swap, porting, bigger valves etc should get better performance before a cam swap does.

I understand that goods heads are biggest thing in making power,as most here do.

I was just wondering what some other may have picked up from cam swap.

Not really even thinking about changing cams. If i did I would probably back off duration some on what I have. Cam is out of TA/FC and/or blown TA/D. Would not be owrth it IMO for bracket car. Now when was running headsup alcohol class I tried lots of different cams,hell only 350 bucks for new cam then. How else would someone have about 12 or more cams on the shelf?LOL

Just a curious question.

A couple years ago we broke a cam between the last lobe and the distributor gear. So the valves were all ok. In a pinch we threw in a cam we had sitting on the shelf.

Old cam
279/286 @ 050
108 LSA
106ICL
746/693 lift

New cam
263/271 @ 050
108 LSA
106 ICL
700/690 lift

Basically no difference on the track. New cam 60fts a little better but by the end of the 1/8th mile the overall numbers are about the same. New cam idles better.

So is the magic cam somewhere between? Or does it really matter that much? The whole thing was an eye opener for sure.

Scott

I had a few different cams in my motor, most basically the same. Then I tried a different rocker ratio one time and immediately broke the cam in half at the 1000'. In a pinch, brought a Cam from home stuck it in with the normal rocker ratio and went 7.20 ish, the next weekend was a national event and I knew 7.20 wouldn't cut it, got an identical cam to the one that broke, and went 6.90's. Which is what it ran before the broken one also. So a-b-a test showed 2+ tenths gain