Jonathan, I think he said he watched with great dismay the element get sucked through the wire mesh as he was working the throttle with his hand!
I'm using the restrictive wire mesh filters on my stack EFI and I notice a big difference in afr on my wide band when I remove the filter. It went from .95 lambda to 1.02 at idle. Here's a pick of my set up in my coupe. I want to use the same in my GT40, but I have the same concerns people in this thread have about air flow:
