The mid 60's heyday og the gassers saw the Willys both 33 and the 39-41, Henty's and aero Willys and of course the Anglia. The "big" cars, Willys most often had a truck rear end. These were wider so the fenders were cut out for the tires. Axels were a big problem so the truck rear end offered a full floating hub. The narrowed axels had not really come of age, they were expensive to say the least. One way was to cut the axel off then bore a hole inthe wheel flange. Then the axel was cut to lenght and machine for a press fit inthe hub. Two or more holes were drilled along the bore line for dowel pins. Then the whole thing was welded together. Many of the dragsters used this. Mark Williams and Strange engineering were about the first to build 1 piece custom axels.
Many cars ran the BW T-10 four speed. These had the heaqvy duty main shaft but still broke occasionally. Even today these trans are the smoothest shifting things out there. The need for an auto was evident however. The early Mopar torq flites were pretty good and could be made better very easy. They still were not up to the blowen cars however. The hydra-matic 4 speed was still the strongest auto trans available. It had a very deep low gear. 3.94 and 4.05 for the Pont ones if I remember. The problem was the fluid coupling as opposed to todays torq converter. There were various attempts to make the coupling slip more sort of like a high stall converter however there was no torq multiplication and efficiency dropped off. The next thing was keeping the trans in 1st gear. B&M and Hydro-motive had the best solution however the racers found that just letting the trans shift to 2nd almost immediately worked better. That's why in the old vids you see the cars are a bit doggy off the line. The shift wasn't real clean so the timing between gears got so effectively you were in 2 gears at the same time. That's not really correct but I guess ratio change is a better description. The things were very tough and very heavy. there was a lot of behind the scene stuff going on back then.
As for induction...the gas classes all allowed mechanical FI...not that there was any EFI back then. Hilborn and Enderle were the leaders with Hilborn more on the gasser side. 2 hole and 4 hole were on the blown cars and stack injection was on the NA cars. These were pretty easy to tune back then. You could call Gene Adams at Hilborn and he would either set up you injector or tell you how to do it yourself. You would run pretty well right out of the box. the things responded very well to tuning and if you had good ignition which was a Vertex magneto you would get the most out of your motor. I don't think I ever saw a competitive carb car back then. There simply were no really good manifolds available. This was a time of developement and many co. were working on manifolds.
The cams were probably the real secret. They were called the cam wars. Isky, Engle, Howard were some of the big guys. There were many matchraces sponsored by the cam co. The foundation of Funnycar matchracing began here. There were new cams every month, new valve springs, better pushrods, and a huge developement was the aluminum roller rocker arm. These allowed much higher lift cams. And of course the roller lifter and Isky's rev kit.
We still had cast iron heads and even Mondello porting still ws not up to what we use on the street now.
Engines...early gassers used the big Olds and Cad motors and of course the 392 Chrysler was king of the hill. The 302 Chev was used often in the lower gassers as it was a high winder and easy to build. But remember today's 400 hp 350 would probably run over most of the NA gassers of the day.
You could go to any truck junk yard and get a 6-71 blower that was good enough to be built into a usable gasser blower for about $100-200. There were no screw blowers or 8-71,12-71 etc. Hampton and Bowers were among the first to make a magnesium case which made quite a difference in weight and they were able to make the internal clearances tighter so they made more boost.
To hit the question a 302 would be right in line in a Henry and a T-10 4 speed would be cool. today you can use a 9 in Ford rear end. I suppose you could use a circle track full floater and it would sure look period. Probly not a lot more money either.
My finger are worn out, time to go play with the streetrod.
