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I can't believe you ran that poor thing at that thing of a speed for so long.
It puked a rod because it wanted some time off.

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That is a unbelievable story there, Wow. I believe you, I bet it ate some gas along the way.

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I have almost every gas recipe from 94 until now! About 13 mpg on the open highway. Some tanks 14-15mpg on a few trips when the hone job was fresh. When I drove it 40 miles each way to work through L.A. to Thousand Oaks it was about 11 mpg. That was 1999-2002. Lot of stop and go coming home (1 hr and 1.5hrs Friday).

I probably would have lasted longer if the pan didn't get sucked dry at Willow Springs Raceway 3 years ago. Took 45 min of cool-down for the oil pressure to resume.

I personally built it in a special enviromentally controlled space. While I listened to a sea of helicopters following OJ Simpson down the Santa Monica freeway...




Back on topic...

I really think that hand picking and scraping the scale off every bit inside the blocks cooling passages made a big difference!!! My dad spend a good 6-8 hours just scraping the inside of the water jackets. I just spends 3 hours doing the same on a much cleaner block. I don't think most machine shops are going to do that. Unless you wanted to pay them $400 extra just for that.

I also think that body design may be more significant than we think. 67/68 Barracuda have big unobstructed grille openings and valance opening under the grille. I just don't have a good way of measuring or comparing that.

I used to worry when the faster I went, the temp gauge would drop from it's normal resting place that the t-stat would keep it at. I mean when I started on a blast to 4200 rpm or something the temp needle would drop a full gage tick/mark. Worse when the motor was fresher (newer bubble gum holding it together).