With the power and driveline issues that arose this season and a spare motor sitting in the garage, I decided to go ahead and swap the motor out. After all the original 275k mile motor leaked, had an oil starvation issue at Barber, and the car really seemed to be down on power. After some coordination we did the standard southeast motor swap at Eric Nissen's and dropped the motor out using a lift.
Once we directed the old motor, we found out the pressure plate straps had broken... Hmmmmm