I bought a brand new 63 boxtop that I ordered with a 352 and a 4 speed. Big mistake as it was in my opinion slow and didn't get good mileage either. But as most know hindsight is usually 20 20. When I ran this car at Minnesota Dragways in 63 these are the only mods made on it. I had my neighbor weld a I think it was 2 inch pipe coupling to each down pipe that I just used a pipe wrench to screw in a pipe plug.
I put a pair of clamps on the front part of the springs to keep the axles from bouncing. I bumped the timing up a bit too. The rear was stock one wheel wonder 3.40 I believe. I did wedge the front springs a bit. 8)tires were what came on it narrow bias plyed 14 inch things. It was all stock even down to the 2 barrel motorcraft carb that came on the 220 hp rated engine. I remember they put me in J stock at the time. It went 16.70's at 86 and 87 mph. I thought that was pretty lame as my 57 292 went about the same BUT at the time the national record was only about 3/4 of a second faster.
. And those cars had headers and good tires and better gears. I had to drive mine 160 miles one way to the strip and back home again.
It would have been fun if I had , had some money to put headers on it and gears and some kind of a traction unit. Just a distributor recurve would have helped too. Like I said I really didn't like the car (The fastbacks came out about a month after I ordered mine) and I tried to blow it up by driving it to the valve float point and it would backfire and ya just couldn't hurt it.