The Burnout Box: Drinking The Kool-Aid

Remember when you could drink out of the hose? You know what I’m talking about, those summer days playing softball in the street or running around with friends, when you could crank open the spigot on the front of your house, let the hot, rubbery-tasting water run out of the hose and then gulp in a mouthful of cool, refreshing water. What happened to those days? The only thing people worried about was fluoridation. Hose water used to be potable. It used to be good for you.

The dreaded double face-palm; twice the face-palming for when situations call for it.

Sometime between those carefree days of youth and me having a family of my own, tap water became undrinkable. Now, we get our water from clear plastic bottles that collect in piles in landfills and wash up on our shores. Why? Has tap water suddenly become tainted with toxic seepage from buried 55-gallon drums of nuclear waste like so many episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?” I don’t think so. No, I think somewhere along the time line, we started believing the marketing hype. Today, a gallon of water is more expensive than a gallon of gasoline.

In doing a little bit of research, my hunch was right, bottled water is no better than from the tap. In fact, this is old news. But the principal is still as upsetting. We, as a nation, willfully switched from one thing to another based solely on the perception that the more expense of the two options was better for us. I’ve been considering this quite a bit lately as I’ve been swimming in a deluge of LSX hype. Over the past year, I’ve been barraged with people telling me, “The LS motor is the new small block,” or “The LS motor is the new big block.” Either can be right, but both are unequivocally – and equally – wrong.

I know and associate with quite a few true “car guys.” These are guys who build their own cars. They don’t own shops with lifts, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of MAC tools, or an annual income of six figures. And since they build these cars in addition to having family lives and careers, they – myself included – have to work our budgets around them. And its because of this very reason that I wonder who is building an LS motor at all.

Seriously, will top tier, high tech powerplants like the LSA and LS9 take the place of a Tri-Power 427 or a big gnarly rat 454? Have I become so old and crotchety that I'm this far behind the times?

I say this with some trepidation, as there are plenty of guys building their existing LS1 in their forth-gen Camaro or LS2-powered GTO. No, what I’m talking about are guys buying a crate motor or bare block and building a complete motor for their classic project car or truck. Yeah, there were like a couple hundred thousand off-road and sand rails built with the lightweight motors, but we’re talking classic iron here, folks. Not dirt cars.

For the more part, any new LS crate motor is anywhere from 25- to 50-percent more expensive than a traditional small block Chevy. If I’m not mistaken, the majority of car guys at the local car cruise across America has a difficult-enough time getting their timing and jetting right. So it confounds me that suddenly all of the magazines, media and forums are preaching how the LS has pushed the 350 SBC and 454 BBC into obscurity. Sorry folks, but I’m just not buying that bottle of Evian water.

Do LS motors make loads of power? You bet your 12-bolt they do. Are they lightweight and scientifically superior to a stroked small block? Yessir. I’m not contesting the LS-motor’s validity. Please don’t think that I am. But what I am questioning is whether they are truly as popular as people are saying. Are you going to tell me that the budget guy is going to fish a new LS3 or LQ4 out of a wadded-up Denali and pay for some shop to rewire it to fit his El Camino? Even with a plug-and-play wiring kit, a motor mount relocation kit, and conversion headers do I see that falling into the normal guy’s budget.

I can remember walking through a chain-owned auto salvage yard with a 5-gallon bucket filled with tools, rags, and some WD-40 and spotting rows of Suburbans, full-sized wagons and pickups with lazy, low-compression two-bolt 454s waiting to get plucked up, rebuilt and transplanted into some kid’s Nova or third-generation F-Body. Small block Chevys are so prevalent that they’re used as table stands and boat anchors.

Maybe I’m missing the point entirely, because when I think of people building a motor for their project car, I immediately think “classic” while forgetting the last fifteen years of LS-powered production cars. Is it a case of “Since I can’t afford it, nobody must want it?” But when offered the option of building a big block Chevrolet rat motor or a modern, computer-controlled LS3, I’m sorry, but there’s no competition. The old stuff always wins. Am I that far off-base?

-Kevin

About the author

Kevin Shaw

Kevin Shaw is a self-proclaimed "muscle car purist," preferring solid-lifter camshafts and mechanical double-pumpers over computer-controlled fuel injection and force-feeding power-adders. If you like dirt-under-your-fingernails tech and real street driven content, this is your guy.
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