[cobrashoch]

There's old And I'm ancient. Rick Lake - I played w/clutchflites back in the day. Your buddys were wrong, clutchflites let the engine rev. nothing else. If the car couldn't hook on a drop hammer start, that's another problem, it's not the trannys fault. Back in those days the Motown Missile had the pro stock NHRA national record and it used a clutchflite. They still couldn't beat Sox though, heck-fire, nobody could.
Of Note
Clutchflites lived in the days before we had anything like modern converter technology. Todays converters have made such tranny trial misfires obsolete, as backed up by current national NHRA records between most of same classes between sticks and automatics. There's usially not a hoot of differences between most of their record times.
That and the fact that the 727 cases of the tranny couldn't take the bonzi drop hammer starts, the cases tended to crack. We were not detoured though, we would just stick weld em up! Needless to say the NHRA didn't like tranny fluid on their tracks, so tranny blankets were required fair for those trannys in those days. (That included turbo 400's clutched verson too)
In short we've gone somewhere else since those days, and boy do I feel old.