I agree that the K&N may have contributed a lot to my problem. However, the the fact is, the spray did what it said it would do - clean the AMM. My wire was black, and now it's clean and bright - this was not an illusion. To me, that means that there is no thermal barrier on the wire, no matter how slight, and that was the minimum goal. The performace improvement was real. I'm just as skeptical as anyone when I read the labels in the fix-all products aisle, but I'm telling you what happened, or I would not have written about it.