Community Forums:

I congatulate you on your racing success and on the development that went into your engines, but I must suggest that much has been learned about what makes power in the past 30 years -- and that applies to archaic things like B20s as well.

The reason for decking the block is not so much to raise compression as to improve combustion efficiency. There's also a lot that can be done with the shape of the combustion chamber in that regard, and also to transfer the burn energy more efficienty to the pistons. There's a tradeoff in the shape between efficiency and flow which we try to balance, and port volume versus flow velocity -- smaller ports that don't look remarkable on a flow bench, may actually result in more power and torque in actual practice.

It's now possible to have a fully streetable B20 (runs happily on 92-octane unleaded) that outpowers full-on race motors from the '70s...