SQUISH BANDS (4)

In an engine intended purely for road racing, with a torque peak virtually coincidental with its power peak and driving through a very close-ratio transmission (enabling the rider to hold engine-speed within narrow limits), making this beggar's choice is a fairly straight-forward proposition: you play with jetting until the motorcycle runs fast. However, road racing conditions allow you to stay right on the mixture-requirement hump; you don't have to worry about what happens two-thousand revs below the power peak, because that's below what you'll use in a race. Motocross racing is another matter entirely, and an engine with a mixture-curve hump will drive you absolutely mad. Jet a motocross engine so that it doesn't melt a piston every time it pulls hard at its torque peak, and (if its mixture-curve is humped) it will be huffing soot and losing power above and below that speed.
The answer to this problem is to iron out that mixture-requirement hump, because no matter how much work you do with the carburetor, it never will be able to cope with the engine's needs. All the carburetor knows, really, is how much air is moving through its throat, and it adds fuel to the air in proportion to the rate of air-flow; don't expect it to know when the piston is getting hot and respond by heaving in some more fuel. How do you get rid of the hump? You do it mostly by substituting a somewhat less effective expansion chamber: one that gives more nearly the same boost all the way through the speed range you are obliged to use by racing conditions, without any big surges. That will result in a drop in peak power, obviously, but you can compensate for it to a considerable extent with the higher compression ratio you previously were forced to forego in the interest of keeping the piston crown intact when the expansion chamber did its big-boost routine. Again, it is all a matter of finding the balance.