carb or fuel injection?

  The modern hotrodder is faced with many decisions when putting together his machine and one of the biggest can be to decide between using a carbeurator or fuel injection. I have a very basic way of helping you choose. If the internet has been around for more than 75% of your life, then fuel injection might be worth a click. If you communicate better texting than you do talking face to face try F.I.  If you met your girlfriend or wife via online dating then you may be compatible with a laptop tuned injection system. Other combo's that come naturally to EFI are turbo's and centrifugal blowers. I personally steer clear of EFI because I worked on it for 6 years at an auto repair shop and I found it to be very frustrating to my flinstonian brain. When diagnosing problems I found that I was wrong as often as I was right and replaced many non-returnable electrical parts needlessly. Customers don't really like paying for parts that didn't fix the problem and neither would I.
  On the other side of the issue, a carb can be confusing but usually repairs and tuning are cheap and easy. Taking it apart soon becomes simple and there is always older racers that can give suggestions for tuning. Choosing a carb is relatively simple. Just ask others with similar combo's to find out what works for them. If in doubt just put on a 750 holley!  One of the things you will start to do if you are a racer is make your car lighter any way you can. Lighter is cleaner, simpler and faster. A single carb sitting on top of an engine just looks so simple and easy. EFI tends to really clutter up an engine bay. Both carbeuration and fuel injection are able to make nasty amounts of horsepower so I don't think there is any benefit either way in that regard. The biggest downfall of EFI is price. A good tuner carb will run around $700-1000 plus another $200 - 400 for a pump and regulator. An EFI system will run at least double that amount not including a laptop to tune it with.  If your car came with a good fuel injection system then by all means use it. The slickest thing I've seen lately is Ford's new trac key gimmick on the 2012 mustang. There are 2 different ignition keys with a microchip in them. The street key is for everyday use then when you get to the race track insert the race key and the computer switches to a race tune up.  So pick your poison, carb or EFI? Just get out there and make it happen!
over and out.