from The Leap Year Single, released February 29, 2016
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I believe that the engine you're hearing in this track is what they call a "Hoover Motor," named after a Chrysler Corp. engineer named (IIRC) Bob Hoover. The recipe starts with a 360 block and builds it... but not in the typical fashion.

The big liability of Chrysler LA small-block engines is the lack of compression. They started out as real firecrackers--more like 10.4:1 or something--but in a misguided attempt to make the engines more environmentally friendly the compression ratio was lowered to more like 8.5:1 in the once-mighty 340. This was accomplished by making the combustion chambers much larger, mostly in the heads. The result was heads that flowed much better, but was also a logey, sad engine that polluted just as bad as it ever did.

The 360 was intended to be a response to this new reality. To make up for the loss of compression, the stroke was lengthened through use of a special crankshaft. Each piston is moving farther in its bore, resulting in more perceived power at low throttle. Beyond bore size, the block castings weren't changed much at all. So a 360 is essentially a stroked 340 with a slightly narrower bore.

If I've got my story straight, what Bob Hoover did was to overbore a 360, 0.40 over. This returned the bore to something more like a 340--and unlike with so many Brand X engines, the LA block was designed for a bore that size. It could take it.

So now you've essentially got a stroked 340. But the good news doesn't stop there.

Mr. Hoover then switched pistons. Rather than resting below the deck or even coming level with it, these new pistons POKED RIGHT UP OUT OF THE BORE. They were shaped to match the combustion chamber, so they wouldn't hit any valves or anything... and like magic, those gigantic, inefficient combustion chambers were transformed into tiny little squeeze-boxes of power--while retaining their good flow characteristics, so you could really wind that mother up.

Compression ratio's now something like 10.5:1, barely friendly to pump gas... EXCEPT that about this time the oil companies started introducing ethanol into the mix. Everyone else complained about the "impurities" in their gasoline, but for motors like this that ethanol was basically just a free anti-knock additive (since knocking, or preignition is the big problem with high compression).

So now instead of your garden-variety 360 truck motor, you've got a fire-breathing, high-compression stroked 340 that'll leave the other guys crying in your exhaust fumes.

And I believe that's what you're listening to here. I know it's not an *actual* Hoover motor because it wasn't built by Bob Hoover. Which is too bad, because I'm sure Bob Hoover had a few tricks up his sleeve that he didn't tell anyone about. But I believe it follows the same basic design specs.