Thank you for the link to the Ricardo bio. I have one of his books, "The High Speed Internal Combustion Engine" first published in the 1920's. My copy is from the 1940's although it was published into the 60's. It is an amazing piece of work with pictures of actual combustion taking place viewed through an izing glass window. He tried various sparkplug locations until he found the location that allowed the highest compression ratio without detonation. This was termed H.U.C.R. for highest usable compression ratio.
He experimented with deck height and found that too much was detrimental back in the 1920's! There are graphs that show the relationship of deck height vs HUCR. As deck ht. increased, HUCR went down.
He understood that turbulence could help keep the air and fuel homogenous something that is lost on engine designers to this day. If the air and fuel go their separate ways an engine won't make the power it should from the amount of fuel consumed, even if air fuel ratio is correct.
Although his testing was done on flathead engines operating at 1500rpm on 76 octane fuel (highest available at the time) his findings are in many ways still relevant.
The best thing about his writing is that it can be understood by a lay person. There are no half page equations, just simple explanations of his findings and graphs that make sense.
http://ford-y-block.com 20 miles east of San Diego, 20 miles north of Mexico
