I’ve been slowly assembling my ’66 Chevelle small-block Chevelle, the one that was on the Apr. ’09 cover that is now orange. We’ve taken to calling this car the Orange Peeler as much for the fact that it spins the tires as for my less-than-perfect bodywork. The car runs a very simple HT 383 crate engine from GM Performance Parts. A very long time ago we bolted on a set of TFS 215cc intake port aluminum heads on this engine along with a Comp Cams 282 hydraulic street roller that specs at 230/236 degrees of duration at 0.050-inch tappet lift with 0.510/0.520-inch valve lift. For induction, it has a Barry Grant 750 mechanical secondary carb with an Edelbrock Performer RPM Air-Gap manifold. Initially with the Turbo 400, this car was not much fun to drive on the freeway because we had to spin the engine upward of 3,000 rpm just to keep from getting run over by traffic. Recently, we spoke with Art Carr, who owns California Performance Transmissions, and he rebuilt a 200-4R automatic overdrive to put in the car along with a 10-inch converter that stalls about 2,800 rpm. The overdrive benefits from a little deeper First gear ratio of 2.74:1 and with that new converter, it’s a whole new car, especially when we run it up on the freeway. On level ground, the engine is only spinning 2,200 rpm at 72 mph. We also helped out the car with a set of Mickey Thompson S/R street radial tires with a 28 x 10 x 15-inch rear tire that also helps reduce the cruise rpm mounted on Rocket five-spoke wheels. At this lower cruise rpm, the car’s a ton quieter inside, and we’ve almost doubled the fuel mileage on the freeway. I’m looking forward to putting this thing up on the freeway for an extended cruise to measure the actual mileage. Best of all, we went back to the 'strip and on the first pass, we went a 0.10 second quicker than our previous best of 7.67 in the eighth-mile at Irwindale. This equates to roughly a 11.88 pass in the quarter. We’ll be doing a full detailed story on the trans swap and all the advantages of the overdrive, so look for it.