like i said tony, he's confusing acceleration for velocity, and it's making my head hurt.

 

Ok so the faster your engine revs, but making the same horsepower wouldnt accerate faster at all. What would be the point of making an engine rev so dam high...to give the car more power band before requiring a shift to the next gear?

I have thought about it today and it made some sence...if your not applying more torque to the wheels your not going to accerate faster even if the engine is outputing the same torque faster in a same time period...its like kicking a ball...you can kick it very fast the same amount of force and it will go the same distance, but if u give it larger power kicks in the same time period the ball will go further.

How does horespower help the car against wind resistance? More strokes in the same amount of time with the same power pushes the car better through the wind, giving the wind less time to fight back the car would be the most logical explaination for that, to me.

I am trying to just give u guys what I think about this, but I guess I have some flaws...I think I understand this stuff now.

There is gotta be an easy analogy for all of this

 

you want an analogy... okay... with constant torque (all else remaining equal), the pin on your speedometer will still be moving up (or around, whatever)... it will just be moving up at a constant rate.

acceleration is how fast your speedo is moving, not how fast your car is moving.

as far as why, i couldn't tell you.

 

its those tiny smurfs in the engine man.

 

If you have constant torque over a range of RPM, HP will linearally increase with RPM.

 

The point of making the engine rev so high, is so you can make the torque at a higher rpm, giving you a numerically higher value of torque output at the rear wheels once the gear ratios through the transmission and differential have been applied.

If you had a choice of shifting at 7k or revving all the way to 11k, you'd be accelerating harder by revving higher, because when you shift to the next gear, the gearing multiplication is less, and you don't accelerate as hard.



On another note:

My favorite commerical relating to this entire thread is a volkswagen passat commercial. The girl goes to pass the car in front of her, and the car salesman in the passenger seat says something like
"See, The torque of the V6 gets you moving int he low end, and the horsepower takes over from there" or something goofy to that effect.

Scott and I always laugh and joke about that commercial.

 

Hahaha...exactly! Thats how these ideas get perpetuated.

 

That's an aweful big word...........pur pech yew adid ....... now you're just trying to confuse me with your commodious vocab.

 

seriously though, this was an excellent thread, one of the only times i go into GCC, and i'm happy with what i found!

 

matt - i agree. well, i'm in here quite a bit, but this is still probably the best thread i've read in the time i've been on tr. most tech discussions go too far over my head for me to get much out of them, but i found this to be really interesting.