info on some piston rings

Yep pretty much. You'll have to excuse me if I don't explain this well, I've been taking some pretty strong pain meds for the past 4 days.

Have you ever checked ring drag? We do it with a small fish scale. Assemble your piston and rod with just the oil ring on the piston. Install the piston into the bore upside down, don't use any oil on it, push it down to near the bottom and hook the fish scale to the rod and pull it up. Read the pounds it takes to pull the assembly up the bore. You'd be surprised some take as much as 45 pounds to pull through. You can reduce the size of the expander by either cutting it down or using a smaller bore size expander. I do my race engines at 12 to 15 pounds. I've gone as low as 10 but that may be too low. Street engines I set at about 20 to 25.

You can also reduce the drag of the rest of the stack by back cutting the second ring to relieve radial tension. I've seen some guys just leave the second ring out because it's really not doing anything especially in a race engine, it's just along for the ride. But stockers have to have all the rings in there so we are essentially just filling the space with a ring that doesn't impart any extra drag. I wouldn't do this on a street engine though and it may not be advisable for a bracket race engine either where you are looking for long term durability. But if you don't mind taking it down and putting in a new top ring every 300 - 500 passes or so it will really make some horsepower.