Pontiac 301 engines were kind of an embarrassment. Rods made of glass, blocks made of silly putty. Yes I remember them well. I worked for Buick back then. When I saw anything with a 301 come in I died a little inside. The Pontiac engines of the 50s to middle 70s were such reliable monsters. From straight 8s to 4s. But the 301 who knows what went wrong.
Yeah, there were a lot of bad choices with that engine... while the intention was to be a lightweight economy V8, they could have done it a whole lot better. The 80-81 blocks were okay, because they had a higher nickel content and better webbing to deal with the turbo, but even with the turbo at 8psi, they ran 210HP.
It is basically, a short deck pontiac block, on a diet. They had a good idea making it a large bore (4.0) short stroke (3.0) motor (like the 302 ford), but with a shorter deck height, you couldn't run standard pontiac intakes, and they also made specific heads with anemic siamesed intake ports and small valves. So, you can't even run standard pontiac heads because you don't have an intake that will work with them. So even though the largish 4" bore would allow you to run a decent valve size, there wasn't anything else to run. If they had just run a standard pontiac block with the same 4.0/3.0 bore/stroke, it would have left the door open to be make a badass high RPM screamer, but they messed it up an almost every turn. The Turbo was a bandaide trying to make a turd perform like a late 70s 400, which it does, but late 70s (stock) 400s were also turds. If you had a 400, you could at least upgrade it.
Guys have take standard heads, and adapted them to the 301, then built custom sheet metal intakes, but it isn't trivial.
