Yeah I used to think about cams the same way but then I started to run into people who had read my race engine articles and used the same cam in their street car and they weren't so happy. A 700 hp pump gas engine sounds like a cool thing to build but if you have a C body and your wife just wants to cruise at 70 mph to a car show in overdrive with the stereo and the AC on then it isn't a good fit. Too much overlap makes the engine run poorly at 1800 rpm even if it has a 4.25 stroke.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that even though this is the race forum a lot of people building street cars post questions here. Some of them don't know that the advice they are getting won't work very well for them. Many times the person making the post doesn't bother to tell us how the car is being driven so people just assume it is a race car. It is a classic failure to communicate.

Personally I think that cams that are too big have turned more people off of hot rodding than anything else. I know of a bunch of backyard mechanic type of guys who bought a big cam for their car then just ran out of patience trying to get the thing to run. Some of those cars got parked, some got sold. Too big of a cam is a real killer when a guy also has a big double pumper carb and a mechanical distributor. That is a nasty combination for an inexperienced mechanic to tune their way out of. A lot of guys just never get it working. The cars are hard to start, take a long time to warm up, belch black smoke and smell bad. Eventually everyone gets tired of it.......