Symptom of Advanced or Retarded Ignition

G'day, my first 2 bikes I had when I was a young bloke had a manual advance and retard lever on the handle bars. You quickly learnt how to start the bike when it was fully retarded or else it would try to kick you over the top. Once started you could adjust the timing and you would just "feel" when it was right because the bike would pull and you could feel it pulling. If you wanted to wake the neighborhood up in the middle of the night you would roll off the throttle and retard the bike at the same time, looked good as well with a great sheet of flame coming out of the pea-shooter muffler at the same time as she went off. Regards Neil

I would say that retarding the ignition timing would be the opposite of valve timing with valve timing retardation would equals more horsepower and advancing it would equals more torque. with ignition timing advancing would gather more horsepower and delaying it would get more torque readily available.
as with turbo boosted engines you can't really mess with the timing or else the big boom theory goes into effect. Like my friend jon says about turbo's "this blows"- jon I've got one of my own that I like to say about natural aspirated engines it goes like this, ready? it goes "this sucks"- dave