This is funny. Reminds me of the late 80s Mustangs flame wars when the guys who bought the GT 5 liters found out the base model notch back 5.0s were quicker. Accept that in our cases we have considerably built engines in the 6.1 relative to the 5.7. Forged crank, tighter tolerances, specially ground cam, higher performance heads, tune intake runners, windage provisions, near after market quality intake filtering & exhaust, factory shorty headers, better harmonic balancer, Brembo brakes that haul the 2 ton package down from 60 in supercar quality fashion. And let's not talk about the after market options. The upper limit of the 6.1 is nearly 1000 HP before you start having to strengthen the lower end. The 5.7 shouldn't be pushed much past 600 if reliabilty is to be maintained.

The R/Ts are great Bang-for-the-buck muscle cars. They weren't meant to be the uptimal street performance king.