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A head gasket instrumented with ionization probes made using printed-circuit-board technology has been successfully demonstrated in a single-cylinder development version of a General Motors 3800 V-6 engine. Four different gasket designs were tested, but common to all was the use of a printed-circuit-board layer to provide multiple ionization-probes around the perimeter of the cylinder bore. The probes detect the arrival time of the flame at eight equally-spaced locations, giving an inferred measure of flame geometry. The cylinder pressure is recorded simultaneously with the eight ionization-probe signals using a personal-computer based data acquisition system. The technique provides a useful tool for studying cycle-to-cycle and cylinder-to-cylinder variations in the combustion rate as related to the flame arrival time at the gasket face.