Well coming back to work yesterday in moderate traffic, a 1998 ext cab z-71 kinda cuts me off and goes WOT. It was not so bad that I wanted to run him of the road or anything like that, but I did want the chance to show him what the ole 5.3 would do. His exhaust sounded aweful, like straight pipes with no crossover pipe and you could tell when he floored it, it sounded like the truck was being strangled. When we got to the next red light he cut through the truck stop parking lot and went the same way I was heading, so I followed a few truck lengths back. When we hit the 2 lane he hit WOT with me several lengths back, so i did the same. We were rolling about 30 when I did this, so my truck did not drop into first, just second. RPMs were around 3K, so my truck was not making peak power just yet, so he stayed out in front until i hit about 4K's then he came back to me to the point where I could have pushed him. I let off to 3/4 throttle to about 80 where i stayed even with him, then let him go right before I turned back into work.

He had it floored the whole way, either that or he had the loudest 5.7 I've ever heard at part throttle. I really wanted to own him more than I did, like drop back a hundred feet or so then blow by him on one of the straights, so I am trying to come up with the most effective mods for performance. Here's my list of what i want to do.

Cold Air intake-probably K&N FIPK.
Single 3 inch in/out Magnaflow dumped.
custom tune-Probably Nelson's, both for performance and better shifting.

What do you guys think, is 30+hp to wheels likely with this set-up? Oh yeah, the road we got at it on had no other traffic at the time.

Oh yeah. ext cab 5.3 peg-leg with 3.42's bone stock.