The 'Quickest' A-Body Small Blocks
I can think of a bunch of things you could do to "cheat" a "bone" stock car to run a little better. I imagine long time drag racers in the day new 10 times more then I could ever dream of. Especially if the goal was making a bone stock car a little faster then the others and not last 100s of thousands of miles as your daily driver.
Here are just a few I thought of in 5 minutes of thought...
You know they will weigh the car overall bit will they check weight distribution? Moving some weight around might help, some lighter parts in the front offset by a sand filled spare tire maybe?
What about shocks? Maybe you could modify a set of factory shocks into drag shocks or at the minimum use a set of wore out factory shocks on the front.
You could paint on some diesel/kerosene mix to your tires and soften them up quite a bit.
You could run light weight oil everywhere because you could care less if it lasts more then a few runs.
Going in to the motor opens up so many more cheats, no inspector or certifier will ever see or if you were on the assembly line hand picking the best casting heads, matching it with the best casting intake, rocker arms with the highest ratios of the pile, balance the crank but knife edge the weights and lighten it up.
Use a little thinner head gasket when you put it back together. Offset the cam a bit.
Like I said I'm sure they new 10 times as many tricks. This all came to it's glorious peak when they (the Dodge techs) delivered the super hot, preproduction, ringer Little Red Express for testing. There they went a bit to far but in the end beat the Corvette of the year.... What do you mean W2? Like the tax form?