My Favorite Small Block

Vic Edelbrock Jr.
Chairman, president and CEO, Edelbrock Corporation
All of 'em, actually


No doubt about it--it's God's blessing to the car business. The flathead was on its way out, and there was Chrysler's Hemi, which was a good engine, but it took a lot of money to make it really run. Ford had the Y-block, which was terrible. Then along came the small-block Chevy. My dad had the first three engines that were given to hot-rodders to play with. We got guys to make cams for them so they'd run over 6000 rpm, and we built a three carb manifold for it. I was running most of the testing on them in between classes at USC. What we started finding was that everything we did, it liked. We gained about 20 horsepower with the manifold, another 20 horse out of tube headers, another 10 with a better ignition. It filled a gap, took off running, and never stopped.

I've always loved the 1957 Chevy. I have one that [hot-rod-builder] Posie built for me, and it really takes me back to that era. Can you believe GM built the first 265 in 1955 without an oil filter? I don't know what GM was thinking, but it was fixed by 1956. I have a 1959 Corvette I'm restoring, and a 1963 Corvette, numerous Camaros, including a Smokey Yunick-built Trans-Am racer.

Back in the mid-1980s, GM said it might be making the small-block V-8 for only another few years. Then everybody went up a tree and said, "You can't do that!" So they had to keep building it. That was a beautiful thing.

Mario Andretti
The racer's racer
The 283 four-barrel in our 1957 Chevy

This red-and-white Bel Air was the first new car the family got. We bought it about two years after arriving in the United States. It was popular with the other kids, especially the girls--and, unfortunately, the local gendarmes, too. Ours was a 283 four-barrel, but this one was particularly quick. The only modification we did was to add dual glass-pack mufflers. My dad hated the noise because one of the appealing things about American cars was that they were quiet compared with the small, economy cars available in Europe at the time. Aldo [Mario's twin brother] and I told him some B.S. about how much more efficient those pipes were and gave you something like 30-percent-better gas mileage. He bought it.

My dad never officially gave it to us, never put our name on the title, but we drove it all the time, and, in reality, it was our car. I don't know what ultimately happened to it, but that 1957 took us through our youth in grand style.