Originally Posted by pandin

.02 worth

From June 1996 Motorcyclist
Typed by Todd Knighton, Protomotive Engineering

http://g-speed.com/pbh/cylinder-head-tech.html

read the whole article this is just a small quote.

"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.
Ford's engineers were then vastly ignorant of the world beyond Michigan's borders. They had no idea Harry Weslake and Wally Hassan (who created the very successful Coventry-Climax racing engines) had learned years before not to take too literally what the flow bench said. They were narrowing intake ports to provide nominal gas speeds in the range of 350 to 400 feet-second, making good use of the fact that kinetic energy packing air into the cylinders increases with the square of it's velocity."