when you run straight stingers what happens is you decrease the pipes ability to retain heat as someone mentioned earlier, and what this does is causes the engine to actually run richer, because the sonic wave being returned to the cylinder is less due to the less back pressure now of the straight stinger pipe, the pipe needs to operate at a certain temp to stay in the powerband of the engine was designed to run at. A cold pipe will build more torq sometimes but not more hp, and usually lower then desired operating rpm, which means less power. if your engine was designed to run at say 8500rpm, how good does it run at 7500 rpm wide open??, alot slower!!!
The piston recieves a "x"' amount of combustion heat returned back from the sonic waves from the pipe, the weaker the signal returned the less heat in pipe, and in your piston crown, you will find your pistons will have no carbon on them at all and will be very rich, because its running too cool of a temp now.
The next time you have a engine apart take a look at something, look at the under side of the piston crown, the area above the wrist pin, see that lil round spot that looks like brown choclate? choclate is correctly tuned. Or is it black sooty? sooty is overly rich!!! or is it grey ashey looking? that all tells you a engines state of tune. If you do nothing else but run straight stingers without tuning them and getting the correct back pressure for the engine( (((this goes by the diameter of the stinger pipe with straight pipes))) to run correctly with there will be no mark, as the piston wont be hot enuff to burn anything. Too small of a stinger diameter and long wide open runs will show you the grey ash or better known as "death ash" this is from too much back pressure, too much heat being retained in the piston/head pipe area. You want the choclate bar brown setting.
I know you see drag sleds with straight stingers and think they are cool, but theres a certain diameter that has to be matched with engine size,rpm, distance run,all kinds of things. If you just put them on to be cool without having the knowledge and time to tune them in, your honestly going to be slower then before, but it will be loud!!
