[DMXF]

Tom, no the reports didn't come from BC. I've spoken with Remington about the big block car development and he said he had very little involvement.

Richard, thanks for the info. The 427 car design is actually alot better than most people give it credit. Just look at Bill Murray's results with CSX3032: The fastest replica Cobra (Tom Barnard) with all the new spaceship technology that recently raced at Road America in the '08 Kohler Intl Challenge under the Shelby banner only just matched Bill's lap times there in 3032, with the other ones (like Vincent Dean) around 6 seconds slower.

Even more telling, the top Corvettes running in SVRA (like by Peter Klutte) are tube chassis sillouette cars like modern Sprint cup stock cars, fixing all the shortcomings of the original vette, with different suspension attachment points, widened track, aftermarket brakes, modern top shelf aftermarket aluminum heads, more displacement, wider wheels, bigger front tires, etc than the Cobra and the best vette still only just beat Bill's best lap time at Watkins Glen by about a second......and 3032 is not optimized in a number of ways and is even handicapped by the SVRA forcing Bill to add 200 lb of lead ballast to the car, not letting him run webers or factory dual quads (without a venturi restrictor) and not allowing him a chin spoiler when the vettes are allowed.

Also, from a new sports car comparison perspective, Bill's pole lap time at the Glen in '07 was about 2:04 (old treaded bias ply Sports Car Special tires) and I understand the times for a new Porsche 911 GT2 is around 2:11 and approx 2:14 for a Z06. You can look at most aspects of the Cobra design and see how amazingly good it is, especially if you include the original design package of the aluminum FE engine, with only a few aspects need to be addressed - and even many of them were to be corrected in SA's race cars, like they released a memo specifying that owners move the steering rack around to optimize bump steer, etc.