Very easy and cheap.

Just as one simple example, as there are tons more out there that are more highway friendly...

'64 Savoy
3775lb street car

-74 cast crank 440 pulled out of a land yacht in the junkyard. It had overheated and smelled of burnt oil pretty bad. It still turned over, so we cleaned off the filth & grime, threw in a used .509 cam & lifters, swapped out the springs, Team G intake, 750 DP, $20 swap meet headers of unknown origin, 10" converter, 4.56 gears and a 30x9 slick netted us 12.80's. (No valve job or anything. Lots of miles on the engine.) Freshened up the heads, added a factory Max Wedge intake, 600 AFB carbs and got it down to 12.40's. I'm sure it would have run the same or better without the Max Wedge intake, but we wanted to get into NSS racing. This was back in the early/mid 90's...had all of $200 in the motor minus the Max Wedge stuff since we had extra parts laying around. It would have been quicker yet if we had something better than a TCI Streetfighter converter.

Was it an ideal highway cruiser? No. But it was driven everywhere including the highway and it would run on crap gas. Contrary to popular belief, the street manners were fine. It did not run warm, idled in traffic, etc... It's all what you are used to though.