The first thing I would do to soup up this engine for racing would be to look into some sort of a set of six (X3) ceramic (like space shuttle tiles) header mounts and ceramic bolt and concentric-nut ceramic washers with a wider set of drilled-out bolt flange custom header mounts designed for the ceramic head-header ceramic heat isolator distances. With such headers it would be possible to cool the cylinder heads 70% more, reduce oil deterioration, thinning and consumption and all the attendant plug and EGR/IAC fouling problems, and guarantee safer cool-downs.
It used to be common to find ceramic transistor to heat sink mounting washers cast in elaborate concentric "wide-brim top hat" shapes to allow screws to be tightened to hold power transistors plated-copper tabs to mica plates against aluminum heat sinks without putting power/voltages onto the metal heat sinks. The thin mica sheets between the transistors and the heat sinks are excellent heat conductors but don't conduct electricity, whereas the ceramic washers conduct neither heat nor electricity, allowing the screw to fasten the transistor to the heat sink with good pressure, yet without making any electrical contact. such flat ceramic "wide-brim top hat" type washers would allow exhaust header flanges to be tightened with their normal metal bolts and nuts through enlarged (drilled out) header-flange mounting holes, and they, coupled with a ceramic "donut" for the exhaust gas port couplings themselves, would completely isolate exhaust temperatures from the all-important combustion chambers/heads, making cooling the engine childsplay..
Get it? No metal to metal contact between the cylinder heads/studs and the exhaust headers! This way you can cool the heck out of the cylinder heads/mixture and blow all the destructive heat you want right out the exhaust ports and be certain it's gone (never to return) forever!
Granted you'd probably need heat sink fins and electric fans to air-cool the headers, but your Catalytic converter would be smiling and you could probably multiply the horsepower by double. It seams that more than half of this "cooling the engine" business is really using it to cool the exhaust headers through the cylinder heads.
