History
On what do we base our knowledge? First we want to say that we don’t want you to substitute your judgment for ours. You know your car best. But we’ve tried so many things in 25 years that maybe we can help you get to a good result quicker, and probably even a better end result.
Most of our experience has been with 300-550HP American V8s. But if you read the instructions, you’ll see that they apply to any internal combustion gasoline engine. Jetting a carburetor or redoing the distributor curve is the same, procedure and sequence is the same.
But back to the history, where do we have all this information from? 2 out of 3 sources, we would say. First of all from articles in magazines like Car Craft etc etc, and books. We’ve read so many articles and books on this subject, desperately looking for that info that would help us win a race. The second source is our own blood, sweat and tears. Everything on these pages are things we’ve tried in real life. This is not about reading about it and putting it on the web. We’ve done it all in real life. So what’s the third source, the one we haven’t used? So called "good advice". Through the years we’ve heard so many people claiming that they knew stuff, and what had worked for them. Some gave us good advice, but most did not. We’ve heard comments like “this engine is so wild it simply can’t have decent idle” and “the bigger the carburetor, the more power”. Both are not true, sorry to say.
So what have we had to play with? Many smallblock Chevys, some normally aspirated, one with tunnel ram, one with blower, one with nitrous. A Ford Cleveland. A bigblock Chevy Marine engine with blower (550HP) in a boat, and a boat with 2 engines. Most of these we’ve raced, not circle track, so you won’t find any tips here on setting up the suspension, but dragracing. We’ve won many races, most in fact, and what makes us proud is that we often have won races against cars with theoretically more power, bigger engines and more money spent. But those cars were probably not well tuned, so they didn’t make the horsepower they should. One car we tuned was running pretty well before, but after spending a day tuning and testing it, it was 1.5 seconds faster 0-60 mph. That is like finding 100 HP for free!