My 351w is just a mild, warmed over mill that is putting out about 400-425 at the flywheel, and the rear wheel had about 345hp or so. Not a monster motor by any means, but it does do a low 12 in the 1/4 according to my G-Tech.
This same, lowly 351 has around 2,000 track miles at Willow, about 1,800 of it with a video camera, and not once is there any thing resembling a BB passing me. I have alot of video of me passing them, though. In fact, there is some footage of me following a guy in his BB Contemporary for about 4 laps, and he never pulled more than 3-4 car lengths on me down the long 1/2 mile front straight. By turn 2, I was all over him again. Funny thing about that incident is that about a week after I got home, I noticed that my vacuum secondaries were never opening; I was stuck on the primaries during the weekend at Willow!
All one has to do is check out the lap times that Gordon Levy was turning while driving Scott's car about a year ago...not only was he cornering faster than any BB out there, but he was passing them down the front straight too! No driver skills needed there.
I made a comment somewhere else about what Remington had said last week about the different 427's that were used in the Shelby's. Everyone there knew that the Nascar 427 was only good for racing long, Stock Car types of events where there was very little load put on the engines. He said that they didn't like the start/stop type of racing found in sports car racing. They put production 427's in the regular Cobras which were sold thru Shelby, not the Nascar 427's.
When it came time to test a 427 for the Gt Fords, they had to basically start from scratch. Some had aluminum heads, a dry sump
oil system, a reinforced bottom end, and hundreds of hours of testing on the dyno making the thing live for an extended period of time. They even had to detune it down to about 475 hp and keep the redline down to about 5,300 or so. Their biggest fears were that the Chevrolet guys would run rabbit and smoke them because they were putting out about 100hp more and doing it with reliability in the Chaparrals. Their weak link was the auto-box.