I got all that except for the intake air being heated by the headers.  Might be great for efficiency but wouldn't the resulting drop in density reduce maximum power?  I do remember Smoky Ys' engine but I never got an answer to the obvious question.  If it's so great, why doesn't everybody do that?  It would be so easy and cheap to do.

 

Tracy

Sorry, I went off on a rant and didn't answer your question. The answer is detonation. An auto ignition of the fuel air mixture remote from the spark plug(s) and after the planned ignition event. All you need to produce detonation, is too high a mixture temperature. So nobody could do it with a carb, because if there is fuel in the air it will light and ruin the engine. So Smokey's engine had a carb sitting up on top. But his engine was using superheated intake air, so, it had to be injected, and the carb was just a throttle body with no fuel going through it at all. Knowing his skills, he may have invented his own electronic high pressure injection.

 

To complete the illusion he only needed to hide the injectors from the young engineers sent to unravel the mystery. Keep in mind this man had cams ground for Hudson Hornet 6 cylinder inline engines so he could run the engine backwards. .Anti clockwise looking from the front. He ported manifolds by pumping abrasives through them. He pumped coolant into the heads and out the block sides. (Adopted by Cosworth) He could have fed the carb fuel for the accelerator pump and idle circuits but not the boosters. So if anyone checked the carb would look completely Kosher.

 

For the engine to pull from a stop at low RPM, he must have been injecting and ignition timing right at TDC. The radiator in that car was the heater core. So, the answer is that it requires medium to high pressure direct (into the combustion chamber) injection. He could have used steel or cast iron pistons to keep the noise down and reduce size changes from heat. The injectors could have been concealed inside the valve covers.

 

But it had to be injected if it was running on regular car gas. If the fuel can be kept in the form of a gas right up until ignition, there is a chance for every fuel molecule to attach to an oxygen molecule. As an atomized liquid, it will never burn completely. True the heated air would be less dense and so have fewer oxygen molecules, but a turbo addition could force feed nearly any amount of air and oxygen.

 

Lynn E. Hanover