[ImportGuy]

Someone brought up squish earlier, so I thought I would clarify a bit. The man you're probably speaking about is Larry Widmer of NHRA Boss fame.

He was and is against even measuring the static compression ratio, all he cares about is the cylinder pressure (dynamic compression). The squish, refers to quench, and his goal is always to design the combustion chamber (the piston is the floor of the chamber) to deliver the best mixture possible, to the smallest area possible infront of the exhaust valve(s). If you can make that mixture burn quickly, and keep extra pockets of mixture from forming, there is no chance at detonation. Because of this, he ran 25:1 compression ratios with no problem, on pump gas. They called the squished mixture, "instant octane." There is a lot more to it, but his "soft head" technology has trickled into many things over the last 30 years, and I don't know of anyone else that has caused as many rules to be changed in NASCAR; for instance, you can only run a 12:1 CR ratio now.

If anyone has questions about it, I can try to answer them, I really do enjoy the subject...