Gator's Challenge

[rzbill]

Gator,
As RJ says, high torque is good for acceleration and high HP is good for high top speed. Good rules of thumb.
Some folks mistakenly come to the conclusion that one can get the high torque (high accel) via gearbox mounted on a small HP motor.
The fallacy in this is that as soon as the motion begins (motion means time) , the torque drops quickly because the small motor does not have the HP (meaning torque per unit time) to keep the torque up at the desired level as the speed increases. Acceleration quickly falls off in this scenario.

From a practical standpoint, the street motorcycles I have tuned have focused on midrange and upper midrange torque rather than high top end HP.
I think the same could be done for street cars too.
Good midrange torque (and the associated HP that occurs at those RPMs) makes for a quicker and more pleasant ride because acceleration is easily available at an instant without having to shift gears and reach for top end HP.

And I always liked the beer glasses in the UK that had the legal fill line near the rim.
I want my $.12 of beer and not a cent less.

 

[Groundhog]

A flat track motorcycle racer friend once explained to me that; "Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall. Torque is how big of a hole you make."

 

[eugene13]

My avatar is a picture of the valvetrain of a high rpm, high horsepower motor, wonderful if you can put it to the track. We now race a low rpm high torque motor, it pulls the car off the corner better and dosn't light up the tires, sometimes less is more, and we go faster, just my 2c.

 

[JPigg55]

I always thought of it as:
More HP=More Speed
and
More Torque=Less Time to get there.

 

[eugene13]

One more way to say the same thing

 

[JPigg55]

Here's a link with a decent description.
https://www.popsci.com/what-is-hors...pJobID=1183266375&spReportId=MTE4MzI2NjM3NQS2

 

[kd4gij]

Depends on the size of your horse.

 

[Grumpy Gator]

So if you got a bigger horse does that mean you got a bigger Newton?
**G**

 

[Ray C]

Some horses put out more horsepower if coaxed with apples or carrots. This is equivalent to putting low-test or Ethyl in your car. This is a known fact by the way. ().

Ray

 

[Groundhog]

Some horses put out more horsepower if coaxed with apples or carrots. This is equivalent to putting low-test or Ethyl in your car. This is a known fact by the way. ().

Ray

The apples and carrots might work but changing octane in your gas will not help horsepower. A higher octane gas will allow you to make changes to your engine that result in more horsepower (increase compression ratio, advance timing, etc.) but octane in and of itself will not make any difference in an engines performance.