This Healey packs a Yankee V8: Divine inspiration, or sacrilege?

At a car show last month, I came across one of the most interesting engine swaps in memory. The owner of this dark red Austin Healey 3000 decided to do a period-accurate V8 conversion on his car, by dropping in a 283 V8 engine from a 1962 Corvette! Now the Austin Healey 3000 had a strong engine to begin with, but this conversion gives 1.6 times the engine displacement of the stock engine, while lowering the weight significantly. Not only that, but the Healey engine was famously tall (it was originally developed as a powerplant for a mail truck!), and this conversion lowers the car's center of gravity enormously, while moving it back, closer to the center of the car. The handling improvement over a stock Healey must be startling!

The most appealing aspect of this conversion is to ponder the historical "what ifs" here. If someone had done this type of conversion back in the day, could the Chevrolet powered Healey have been a rival to the to the Ford powered AC also known as the 289 Cobra? With proper development and funding, a Chevy-Healey could have had quite a sucessful life in competition and sales back in the early 60s, but probably GM's marketing department didn't want to foster competition with their own Corvette offerings. So we'll never know if the sports car market had room for yet another Anglo-American marriage of beauty and brawn. Still, I would love to do a comparison test between this car and a 289 Cobra and see how they stack up alongside one another. For me, the car is prettier than a 289 Cobra, but is it also faster around a track? Click here for more pictures!