Interesting discussion, this! The last 2 months it has been my pleasure to
crew on a car driven on the salt flats at Boneville. The car is a 1980 Camaro
(the one that was in Hot Rod Mag a few months ago) and it has a 296 cubic
inch engine. The engine has a static compression ratio on the order of 16 or
17 to one and uses 118 octane race gasoline. It has a full complement of MSD
hardware, primarilly an MSD 6AL. This year we laid on a 200hp shot of Nitrous
at the top ends of the run. Now the interesting part is that the engine
consultant comes from Conn, the car from Alabama and me from Las Vegas. The
engine man always takes the plugs out and his comments are generally, "gap is
not an Issue". He reads the plugs looking for bit of aluminum and clean
firing. But he generally just pulls the plugs from the box they came in and
sticks them in. And this is a very knowledgeable engineer who has worked on
many formula 1 cars, top fuel, funny cars, and Bonneville cars. Oh, this car
has about 765hp on the juice, so it has the capability to missfire. But, it
runs very strong at WOT for a full 6 miles! "Gap is not an
issue"...Interesting thoughts...
mayf
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