Holley offers three stages for carbureted Chevy small-blocks: Pure Street (for daily driven performers), Hot Street (for street/strip), and Wild Street (for the biggest power that Holley expects you’d actually want to live with on pump gas). Within each range, Holley specifies three stages: Stage 1 is external bolt-ons, Stage 2 includes a cam swap, and Stage 3 utilizes Holley’s aluminum cylinder heads. Recommended accessories such as water pumps, fuel pumps, valve covers, and even mufflers are also delineated on the Street Avenger Web page. Basically, it’s a menu of parts that will work best together so you can build an all-Holley engine without having to wonder if you’re making the right choices, and so that you can buy parts either all at once or as you can afford them.
In our case, we needed a baseline combo for the Anvil, a bulletproof small Chevy short-block we built last month as a long-term test mule. The intention was to start mild, but we couldn’t help ourselves: We went straight to Holley’s recommended components for the Wild Street system. That included the 770-cfm Street Avenger carb, a Holley Street Dominator high-rise dual-plane intake, a Lunati 235/240-at-0.050 cam, Holley 20-degree cylinder heads, full Holley Annihilator ignition, and Hooker 1¾-inch-tube headers. We added Lunati 1.6:1 roller rockers of our own accord. Installed on our 359ci (4.040 bore, 3.500 stroke) Anvil, this setup had 9.74:1 compression thanks to 5cc reliefs in the Lunati pistons, a piston deck height of 0.010-inch, Mr. Gasket head gaskets with a 0.044-inch thickness, and the 67cc chambers (66cc advertised) in the Holley PN 300-552 heads.
Holley doesn’t claim a specific power number for the Wild Street combo, but our results should be typical of any 350ci small-block with similar compression: 461 hp at 6,300 rpm and 446 lb-ft at 4,500 rpm. See the sidebar for the full power curve. It idles at about 900 rpm and 11 inches of vacuum with the newly redesigned Lunati cam that’s spec’d for the cause with a 112-degree lobe sep. With a 3,000-stall converter and 3.73 or 4.10 gears, we’d hope you could get even a bulky Chevelle into the mid-12s with the Wild Street setup. Too much thump for you? Easy. Use the Pure Street or Hot Street cam instead. Meanwhile, we’ll have fun stepping even harder on the Wild Street setup. Watch over the next few months as the Anvil earns its stripes with a bigger cam and intake, a Fogger nitrous system, Holley’s Stealth Ram fuel-injection setup, and a Holley Megablower.
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