"No offense but these old cars are not jet engines or F1 cars."

No offense Hatterasguy.....but our cars have almost twice the compression ratio of those F1 cars ....and don't get taken apart between every race... not even every decade.... if done properly...
Sounds like you are too young to have experienced some of the off the wall mechanical things some of us have.... and we swear we are not going to repeat them.... thus we start trying to learn what works and what does not...