Nitro, I'm not trying to stir up a big flaming argument here. I didn't think I had, but after re-reading my last post, maybe I came off a bit too abrasive. I appreciate your explanation of the theory, but was just curious if you possibly had stated it backwards...

Years ago Smokey Yunick did a bunch of work on Chevy small block cooling systems. One of the things he discovered was that, because of the way coolant circulates in the engine (block first, then forced through the heads), cylinder head temps were uneven and erratic, especially the rearmost cylinders. The trouble with that is one or more cylinders may be at optimum operating temps while some others are too cool and still others are melting pistons. It's not a huge problem on the street; we just cool the hottest cylinders enough to make them live and the others survive just fine. The temperature that we read at the front of the intake or the front of the head is an "average" of sorts. In a radically built race engine, though, they want all cylinders at optimum power efficiency all the time. The way Smokey finally did it was to reverse the flow and cool the heads first. It dropped cylinder head/combustion chamber temps so that he was able to boost the compression ratio higher yet and still maintain optimum efficiency temperature in all 8 cylinders. The latest version of the Chevy's V-8 has reverse cooling...

All this still doesn't answer your original question, Don. Even if the sender was just reading the temp of the metal of the intake with no coolant circulating, it should have been more than 120...