At this point, legendary cylinder head specialist Joe Mondello and engine builder Richard Maskin come into the picture. As a full time racer and engine builder with a 35-year career in Pro Stock competition, Maskin has always been on the cutting edge of technology. In 2003, he bought a wet flow bench that Mondello had designed and built at the Dart. By late 2003, the Dart folks were using this radical flow bench to improve the performance of the cylinder heads on Maskin’s NHRA Pro Stock engines, as well as to improving the many mass-produced, high-performance cylinder heads Dart makes and sells to the drag racing community. Since Dart got their wet flow bench operating, many other engine builders and manufacturers have developed or bought wet flow benches, and Mondello has built at least one other like the one he built for Dart. 
On a recent trip to Detroit we visited the Dart facility to learn about wet flow bench research and development versus the conventional dry bench system. We also talked to a few other experts to see what they thought about wet flow technology.
The head of cylinder head R&D department, Tony McAfee, has been using the wet flow bench at Dart since it became operational. When asked how he initially used the wet flow bench to make improvements to the cylinder heads Dart has designed and built prior to utilizing wet flow for R&D, McAfee said that he discovered that some of the data he obtained using the wet bench flowing a small-block head could be also used on a big-block head, or vice- versa, regardless of its application.
One of the advantages that McAfee and other cylinder head specialists we talked to, including Billy Leverentz (Oddy’s Automotive), was that a wet flow bench allowed them to see the fuel/air mixture as it flows through the intake port. It allowed them to see exactly where the fuel drops out of atomization as the mixture travels from the fuel source through the intake manifold runners to the runners/ports of the cylinder head into the combustion chamber and actually change the way the fuel flows and is dispersed. (Ed. Note: Darren Morgan, who designs and develops cylinder heads for Reher-Morrison, also has used a wet flow
bench for R&D their heads for several years.)
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We asked McAfee how the wet flow bench has helped him improve fuel management in the cylinder head’s ports. He said, “The short turn, the bowl and the combustion chamber are the basic elements. In a lot of ways you can't really change how the fuel flows through the port because the port has got to be what it is. You can horse with it and mess with it, but you can't change it much. We've been beating on that for 40 years. The question is how is the fuel going to run through the port? It's going to run and you want to re-collect it and re-distribute it around the valve the best you can. That's your last chance, at the valve -- anything within an inch of the valve, one way or another.”
