Here's my personal experience. It's kind of long to explain what happened and what I was trying to achieve. This was some 20 years ago, so some of the numbers are a little fuzzy.
Okay. I use to build BB engines for several teams, all were single carb, 1/4 mile engines; all ran 8s in the 140s, except for the roadster I drove that ran 175+ with a tunnel ram.
A car with one of my engines was going to a meet. There was a meet in Michigan we wanted to attend, and I wanted to try a new Crane Inverted Flank SR. So I degreed it in according to Crane's cam card and next day we headed for the four day meet.
Engine sounded awesome, sharper that ever before and throttle response was wicked. Cranking compession jumped a LOT so I backed off the timing 2 degrees (?)
Two passes were made during Thursday time trials and the driver came back complaining that the power seemed to go flat at the first MPH stripe. Since the IFR was to critical on valve lash, I couldn 't play with that, so I ended up re-phasing the cam to retard it four degrees.
On engines running Cloyes chains, whenever I'd degree a cam, I'd always install a bushing so I could re-phase the cam at the track if needed. Of course this called for re-setting the ignition timing and a tweak to the carb idle mixture.
With that move, Skip reported power hung on till the finish line, but he wanted even more. He wanted to be able to push his competitor to break-out in case he needed to. This told me he wanted even more top end.
We kicked it around for a while and I finally convinced him that we could try getting what he wanted by going a different route.
So we upped the pill in the 7AL allowing him to leave a 7k/7.5k (?) and raised the pill in the rev limiter to 9.2k.
Anyway, we entered into an 8.90 index and he went three or four rounds before he red-lighted out. I don't recall the numbers, but after the retarding, his 60' times were down a little, but his half track times were better, the engine continued to pull through the traps and he never got ran over.
Hope some of this helps.
Jake