That would be me. People taking it farther than I have like that orange procharged challenger with a 383, or the totally home built avenger with a turbo.
I preached the importance of ignition timing and benefits of distributorless programmable ignition for years on this board to be ridiculed and doubted by the vast majority of users on this board.
Now 15 years later, it has become acceptable here to embrace technology that has been available for years.
It was explained to me years ago by Kenny D that it’s real easy to keep an engine alive if you time it to keep the crank rolling forward instead of pushing it down. This is an easy rule to follow with a turbocharged engine. There is no need to maximize timing to make power. All you need to do is turn up the boost.
The weak link in my situation (400block/ 3.90 stroke 7000-7200 rpm shift) was the cylinder bores. They were shaped like beer kegs after years of making more power than I was told was possible. Still made good reliable power, but it ate rings every season.
I also remember you made some super trick tool steel straps for your main caps. They were a work of art!
Completely agree on the timing aspect. Monte used to preach the same thing regarding nitrous tunes, make sure the timing is safe before anything else. I'm not a fan of locked out distributors either, but like multiple people have mentioned it's hard to get a perfect curve with just advance weights. EFI makes it so, so much easier.
I've worked on OEM stuff where we measure cylinder pressure in real time, and the first time I did it I was shocked at how sensitive an engine can be to timing. +/- 2 degrees can be a loss of 20% of torque in either direction, and on the high end it's only beating the bottom end up.
