nless you were there to
witness it, Chevrolet’s intro-
duction of fuel injection in
1957 is probably beyond
your comprehension.
Nowadays, we’re sort of desensitized to
revolutionary technological breakthroughs.
Self-driving cars are already a thing and
the best that most of us can muster is
indifference ... or anger.
Probably the closest we’ve come to that
sort of watershed breakthrough in modern
GM performance was the introduction of
the LS engine. You likely remember first
hearing about it. It was awesome. It made
killer power. It didn’t leak. In fact, the LS
is better than the small-block in every
way but one: looks.
And that’s a problem in a market so
BY CHRIS SHELTON (^) I PHOTOGRAPHY BY THE AUTHOR
Manifold Destiny
One a beauty, the other a beast by all regards,
the Rochester injector meets LS Classic
[ TECH]
influenced by aesthetics. Over the years
we wrestled with ways to gussy-up the LS.
Remember the lamentable trend where we
covered engines with handmade shrouds?
Or how about those manifold and timing
cover kits that hobble the LS’s drive qual-
ity with a carburetor and distributor? More
recent kits plumb the injectors in a more
conventional manifold but at best the con-
versions just make the engines look like
they’re carbureted. Which is cool and all,
but ... meh.
Then LS Classic happened. Founded
by Elio Martin, the company produces
manifolds for the third- and fourth-series
small-blocks that look for all intents and
purposes like early Rochester fuel-injector
units. No, these aren’t covers that hide
all that’s ugly about the LS. Nor are they
adaptations of Rochester’s mechanical
injectors to LS engines. Rather they’re
clean-sheet designs that boast the best of
both worlds: mid-century looks with 21st
century electronics and performance.
The backbone of the system is that the
manifolds are produced the same way
Rochester cast the original units: with a
separate base and plenum. “They look like
the originals,” Elio explains. They even have
the long runners common to the old and
new systems. “But we had to make some
changes to get the performance and drive-
ability that people expect.”
“The top of the original early manifold,
for example, it’s too narrow,” he contin-
ues. “There’s not enough room for the
air to change direction and go down the
ports efficiently.” (This might explain why
Rochester redesigned the manifolds with
a wider plenum in 1963). “We widened [our
early version] a little bit to give the air a
little more room to change directions. It
looks like the original, but if you put it next
to an original you can see the difference.”
Speaking of the later plenum, last year at
Goodguys Columbus, LS Classic debuted a
manifold that resembles the 1963-’65 ver-
sion. And due to a recent redesign of the
early manifolds, both systems fit the later
square-port heads. “They’ll work on the
cathedral-port heads with billet adapters
that we sell,” he points out.
As indicated, these are fully electronic
systems. “We use the factory GM hardware
like throttle bodies and injectors,” he says.
Where LS Classic draws the line on factory
parts is the ECU. “You can actually use the
factory ECU—and people do it—but it’s not
the easiest,” Elio explains. Among other
things, the LS Classic system can’t use the
mass airflow sensor. A savvy tuner can
eliminate it, of course. But it takes a savvy
tuner to change anything in the system or
20 VETTE 19.11