Your elevation where you live and the design of your head's combustion chambers will dictate how high up in compression you can go before needing exotic fuels. If you're close to sea level 10 or 10.5:1 is really pushing the bill. The fella I bought my Tunnel Ram from was running 12 or 13:1 on his Ford 302. My 289 is right about 9:1 as I slapped the ram on an engine that wasn't idellically set up for it. But it seems to work pretty well as it is.

And let me repeat this....... Mike P is dead on right. You will need LOTS of patients and plan on having the hood up 90% of the time dialing it in. I was persistant too about putting on a tunnel ram (mostly for the wow factor) but it does have some cajones, certianly not on the bottom end, like it use to, but that was to be expected.

Ported stock heads may not actually be enough, but nevertheless, will definately help. Definately recommend a higher stall converter. I'm running a stock stall now, but getting it to idle in "drive" decently is proving to be almost impossible.

When I was looking into Rams, I was led to believe from the elder crowd, that running vacuum sceondary carbs on a Tunnel Ram was a no-no because Tunnel Ram's create a vacuum signal is so weak and inaccurate. I was told to use manual secondaries, even though I have seen other setups with vac secondary carbs. Just food for thought.

And another thing, you're only running 900cfm when your foot is completely burried in the throttle. So like what was said before, disabling the secondaries (if you're afraid of overfueling) may or may not be a bad idea. However if you jet it to operate in the lower rpm ranges (street use) you may easily run lean when you do "mash it."