I just remembered another incident......
I am not a drag racer by any means, but I built a big motor for the Charger anyway. 440 block, 4.15 stroke crank. 10.8 to 1 compression, Edelbrock heads, 850 carb, MP '509 cam, 2" TTI headers too. 727 with a 3000 stall converter and a 4.10 SG diff. Long ago I did an electronic ignition conversion.
A local dragstrip had a car show & drag race event and I decided to race the car. I opened up the spark plug gap to .045 thinking the wider gap would make for a bigger spark. I put-putted to the venue to keep the wife from wigging out. So there I was, at the starting line. No burnout really, just a quick spin to clean the tires. The lights came down and I walked it out of the hole to avoid blowing off the tires. As I laid into the throttle, the motor started cutting out. At full throttle it was bucking, sputtering and hesitating. By the halfway mark I let up to about half throttle. I was shocked to see that I still turned a 14.83.
At home I dug in to see what was to blame. Nothing was obvious at first look. I pulled the plugs and closed the gap to .035 and went for a drive. It ran better than at the track, but was still cutting out. I pulled the distributor cap and saw that the air gap from the reluctor to the pickup coil was W I D E ! Its supposed to be set to .008 inch. Mine was at .020, 2 1/2 times the recomended gap. I reset the gap and everything was back to normal!