My head hurts after skimming that, but two paragraphs jumped out at me:
Ford's 1960's four-cam V-8 also had huge intake ports, and while it turned more revs than the Offy four-banger engines then dominant at Indianapolis, it was no better than a match for them. When given an early peek at the Indy Ford's cylinder-head castings, I expressed the thought that its ports might be too big. Ford's engineers were too polite to tell me how absurd they considered my remark to be, but their expressions made it plain. I was too polite to send them an "I told you so" note after Dan Gurney sent one of the engines to Weslake Engineering in England, where it's intake ports were made smaller and its output got bigger.
I'm not convinced that polishing a port's interior surfaces to a mirror finish does anything but look good. The problem here is that while we know there's a degree of roughness beyond which flow suffers, we can't agree on the limit to which polishing helps. One (sic) those rare occasions when I do porting myself, I settle for a smooth but not polished finish. If I were in the head porting business like my long-tie (sic) friend Jerry Branch, I'd put a spit shine inside the ports and combustion chamber, just as he does. The way Jerry does it, his customers never have to wonder if the ports are smooth enough.
