Early A body handling mods and hints?

I bought a 1965 Valiant with the intent of using a stroker 360 motor with a small turbo to make a fun street car to help me learn about turbo motors tuning and building as well as to learn more about handling on the streets instead of at the drag strip only
I'm more than likely keeping the stock front suspension and changing the upper arms to adjustable ones along with adding better later model disc brakes. This car was a slant six car so I'm open to swapping the torsion bars out also :help
Wide front and rear tires with a lot of acceleration:
All help and suggestions appreciated Thanks in advance: Cab

Other than the front track being a bit narrower the early A and the later A are pretty much the same suspensionwise. You will have the smaller ball joint studs though. So depending on what brakes you are thinking of you may need to get later spindles that use the larger ball joint, Dr Diff has them.

Differences between the early and late A int he front are K member, sway bar, steering centerlink, the /6 link doesn't have the dip to clear a V8 so that may be an issue. Idler and pitman arms. Everything else is either the same or can work, though you do need to pay attention to the ball joint issue with the UCA's (hae to match the spindle's needs) and swaybar mounting tabs may or may not work if you are running later LCA's.

In the rear, well it all will work/swap as needed. Obviously if you go with an 8 3/4 in place of the 7 1/4 driveshaft length will be affected, but that's normal for any body style.

So you could pretty much mimic the Green (or Red) Brick.

Pay very close attention to tire fitment as the wheel wells, stock anyway, are not generous. You can get decent handling tires in the P225/50R15 size, which is probably on the edge of fitting a stock wheel well, especially in the front, 24" diameter.

give pete at https://bergmanautocraft.com/ a call. he will get ya what you want. you'll want 1+" torsion bars, better leaf springs and a good size front sway bar along with good shocks with a proper alignment (not those crappy stock specs) at a minimum. tires will be a huge improvement too depending what you go with,,,

Street Touring:

• 73-76 Upper Control Arm with Moog 7103 Offset upper control arm bushing installed for max positive caster
• 73-76 A-B or F/M/J Disk Spindles
• 11.75 Disk with Dr Diff slider caliper adapters
• 1.00" +/- .04 Torsion Bars
• Hellwig 1 1/8 front sway bar
• Firm Feel Power Steering Gear or Borgenson Power Steering Box
• Saginaw type power steering pump
• Radius or flare front and rear fenders to clear 245/50/17 tires or 275/40/17 tires on all 4 corners.
• Front rims at 5.5" to 6" backspace with 17" rims
• Rear rims backspace determined with fitting. Typically rear fender skirt must be raised and radiused
• Bilstein RCD shocks are Viking adjustable

Notices the wheel arch is moved up. IMHO, it looks better too.

Those cars always look like a hippo with tiny feet.

I'm hoping this will handle decent with the 73-up a body UCA's, Hellwig front and rear swaybars, new set of Just Suspension 340 T bars, Bilsteins and 4 wheel discs with a narrowed Explorer 8.8 rear. We welded in some frame connectors which really helps with the chassis rigidity without adding much weight.

Go power comes from a 440" stroker 360 with W2 heads and a small Bullet Solid roller cam.

These cars are like the ideal size and shorter and lighter overall than the 67-up a bodies. IMO far better build quality too.

I agree with all of this from autoxcuda, although I'll suggest that you consider manual steering with a 16:1 box instead. I run a 63 valiant in the 24 hours of lemons races with a similar setup and it handles great. We ran for quite a while using the upgraded power steering, but the swap to manual was eye opening in terms of steering feel and car control. The manual box is painful at <10mph speeds but once your rolling its very easy to steer and the extra effort is worth the low speed pain.

-Jon