[davepl]

There's always a grand temptation to slap "performance" parts on a vehicle, but unless its to service the needs of other parts, I say avoid it.

For example, adding an aluminum intake and big carb to a stock engine doesn't buy you much unless you have the cam and heads that need it. And at the same time, now you've probably lost the exhaust crossover and messed up the choke and so on... too often we wind up killing driveability and cold start operation without really buying any improvement.

Generally I think engines should be built from the inside out - the pistons determine compression ratio which determines the cam, in combination with the heads, and then the intake and exhaust systems can be improved from there. But in playing with desktop dyno you can see that with the stock cam and heads it doesn't really matter -what- you put on top of them, they themselves are the limiting factor.