The "340" is painted blue for two reasons. First, the car is a numbers matching 318 that the previous owner bored and built the engine to 340 specs with aftermarket parts. He gave us all of the original 318 2 bbl parts however, after consulting with an engine person in our area, they said that if we were to put the 2 bbl stuff back on, it would probably run like crap. He said we would probably be better off finding correct 340 factory parts and put them on so it would rung good and still look factory correct. Second, we found some documentation stating that early 70 model 340s did receive some blue paint. Since the car's sched. prod. date was Sunday Sept. 28 of 1969 we figured that we could get away with the blue that the 318 color was and with the literature supporting our reasoning for painting it that color. Granted it is always open to debate, just like the color of the pie tin for my 383 magnum on my 69 charger. There is a debate with that as to what color the pie pan color is supposed to be for it to be "correct".