Oh, crap... here I am commenting on a freakin' A12 thread.

I'll take Ro McGonegal at his word that the intake & carbs were ripped off from the car, considering I lived in the same city (Alexandria, VA) where he did at that time and know what sort of stuff went on in the middle of the night there.

The Hot Rod magazine article that McGonegal did many years later that talked about that whole deal w/ the car and the test day at Cecil County w/ Ronnie Sox has a lot of good info. I thought it was linked to the A12 Playground web site, but I have a copy of that issue somewhere, too. In it he did mention that he thought in retrospect that the car had likely been "touched" by the ChryCo people to be at the top of its game (he suggested it might have had "blueprinted" heads and a hotter pre-production cam that supposedly was tried out, but not used in final production), plus he mentioned how there was a 2nd set of carbs brought to Cecil that to to dry out which were on the car when it finally dipped into 12s, IIRC.

Also, some time ago I did some digging into the historical weather records for that March 1969 day and found the temp was only in the high 30s that day. Look at the pictures taken and you'll see everyone's wearing jackets and the trees haven't even started to show any leaves, yet. Considering the air temp + Cecil County being pretty close to sea level, I'm sure there was some extra MPH found simply due to the atmospheric conditions.

I'm sure the car was in an "supernatural" state of tune, plus the "minehsaft" air quality boosted the final results. IIRC, nobody who ever tested the same car later on (and was the car ever really "the same" after that day?) ran as well, but they didn't run it in the same conditions, either.