Ernie,
Smokey de-stroked the chevy 427 only for one race; He didn't win.
Chevy de-stroked the 327 to 302 only because they had to, to meet the trans-am max displacement of 5 liters, which is somewhere around 304 ". Pontiac experimented with a 303" engine, 4.12" bore with 2.8" stroke, but it never worked out. They ended up using the chevy 302 in the firebirds, with the smaller bore and longer stroke.
If you take a 289 and stroke it, you get a ford 302. If you take a ford 302 and stroke it, you get a 351. So, a 351 is nothing more than a stroked 289, with a higher deck height. The block has the same bore and bore spacing. I guess all those NASCAR wins with ford engines are with stroked 289's.
A Snake,
I was brousing through a ford web site, and they were talking about cast cranks being softer, or holding a better film of
oil than a steel crank, something about the surface. Just what some serious drag racers were seeing at the drag strip. People spinning bearings always seemed to be running steel cranks.
Regarding the 406, yeah, they were all race engines, solid lifters, but I think all the blocks had the
oil galleries cast in them, so they could have been drilled to run a hydraulic cam, like the 390's and 428's. The 427's from my understanding had a different casting process, and then were machined on a separate line than the other FE engines