[C. Ludwig]

As has been pointed out your timing was advanced way too far. I would start at 25* and creep up from there. All of my NA experience is with 6-port 9.7:1 engines so your results may wary slightly. You would expect the lower compression ratio to want slightly more timing as well as a slightly fatter mixture with similar VE. If you can increase the VE a lot over what we can do with the 6-port and higher compression the timing could be very similar. At any rate, start low and work up until you stop gaining power. As you have seen already, in an NA form it's pretty much impossible to detonate one of these engines unless you have other problems.

The same goes for fuel. We've always found best power in the 13.5:1 area. Going fatter certainly has lost power. Whatever the conventional theoretical optimum a/f ratio is has not applied. Again, start fat and pull fuel until you reach a point you are comfortable balancing EGT and power.

What are you doing for exhaust?

It's probably moot but if you have a bad counter shaft bearing you're still spinning against that friction even in fourth gear. You might not be loading the counter shaft but the friction could be costing you several hp depending on how bad it is. And how big are your tires? No way you're doing 180 mph in 4th with a 4.10 rear gear. More like 130, maybe 140 with very tall tires.

Be extremely careful if you plan on doing full load, high rpm steady state tuning. The loading on the engine is quite dramatic. Something it will not see in real life. The heat build up is quite fast. You will literally get a couple seconds at full load to see what's going on and get an idea of what changes you need to make. You are not going to fully load the engine and sit there and make ignition adjustments and watch torque feedback in real time. You can do this at lower rpm but not at 8k regardless of what kind of fans you're using.