I totally agree with Southern Gent. Power coasts money. Doesn't matter on the cubes. You can make big power with small cubes. Check out www.gpzilla.com . that's mine - I built it myself. It's faster now, I just slapped on a Speed Demon 750 instead of a Edelbrock 750, and had the distributor setup with 28 degrees of advance on it. The engine, to make 430hp, I have about $7000 in it. But that includes all my adapters and stuff. I did all my own work, except I farmed out the machine shop work to about 3 different shops, who did the work to my specs. If you don't tell a shop what you want, you get a plain-Jane machine job. You want your block bored and power honed with torque-plates? Make sure you tell them.

Secrets to power are making the engine breath as easy as possible, and compressing it as much as you can without detonation, and exhausting it with as little backpressure as possible, even scavenging effect on exhaust headers helps.

Want to free up horsepower? Go with all electric on the engine accessories, take it a step above, install a W.O.T. switch that cuts the alternator field which drops the load.

I have a Wrangler with 33"x12.5 tires and 3.55:1 gears that does zero to sixty in 4.6 seconds on a good day. My average is about 5.1 seconds with the full hardtop and steel doors on. It's Chevy 357 six inch rod motor with full roller.

A Crane Camponents roller setup will cost you about $1800. Some awesome ready to run heads will set you back from $700 to $2000 a pair. Wanna run higher compression, go with some Edelbrock aluminum heads, and use forged pistons to bump the compression up to about 10:1 with a full roller timing setup. Go with an MSD ignition box. The spark is like night and day compared to anything that is stock. MSD fires multiple times during each cycle per cylinder.

Use full floating wrist pins. dry sump can free up horsepower dampened by oil slosh on the crank. Run a vacuum pump on the block to ensure cylinder seal and help gain hp.

Every little thing helps, Every little thing costs money.

Set your budget. Dump the most money in the bottom end and heads. It is easier to bolt the goodies on later if you run out of money. Bolt-on go fast doodads need a good bottom end and heads to work with.