Mark, if you have a milling machine available, you can make carb restricters. I did this with Jimmy Smiths car about 4 yrs. ago when he was runing the 7.0 class on gas (he's now changed to alcohol). I had/have a number of CNC machines available to me and i took .030 shim stock and made a series of smaller venturie plates to fit between the carb gasket useing 2 gaskets. I made them each in .030 steps/holes, i made about 10 of them he could go from 6.70 to 7.20 by just changing out the shim plate. They didn't hurt the 60' times and didn't effect the 4.0 tree leave and he could run the 7.0 # at every race he went too. He switched to stacks injection, and run at half throttle with a peddle stop screw, people said that wouldn't work also, WRONG, he won 5 of 8 races attended the first yr. with the stacks.
Congrats on letting you NHRA lic. expire, i let mine expire in April 2010, and didn't re-up my membership. My 1980 Malibu is also a backhalfed car certifiable to 8.50, we now only have 1 NHRA track in the state, so it's not worth it (NHRA) Mine only runs 6.50's with the sm/blk in it.
Zip.