[olddog]

A thought occurred to me.

I am talking about a Mass Flow system, which measures engine load by measuring the volume of air entering the engine and dividing by the volume of air that the engine is displacing (what the engine would suck in at 100% efficiency).

Manifold Pressure or MAP, is another way to measure engine load. However when cams get too far on the wild side, vacuum can be very low at idle. This gives you less resolution to try to measure the engine load, so accuracy suffers. If you get to the point that vacuum is very low at idle and then increases as you open the throttle and rev the engine, before dropping off again, it makes MAP much more difficult to use. At this point you are not going to get ideal results.

Personally I do not think cams of that magnitude really belong on the street. Actually unless there are some racing body rules preventing you from doing the right things, putting on better heads, intake, and exhaust will make more power without such a radical cam IMO, but I digressed.

Using a MAP sensor to map out your timing is a great idea, but it would give less than stellar results if the cam is too wild. However a vacuum advance distributor could do no better on the same engine. I would bet the programmable distributor would outdo the mechanic distributor with vacuum advance on all engines.