Learn the fundementals of stock cars:

You run in 1 gear.
You run LOW rpm in the tight corners, and you run high rpm at the end of the straight.
What gets you off the corner fast? - low end TORQUE.
What gets you down the straight? high end TORQUE. (you may argue with me on that.....but how do you get to high speeds and high RPM's in a single gear without low end torque?)

Road racing: More freedom to use your gears.........BUT you can not run in high RPM's everywhere on the course. Throw hills into the equation. How do you pull out of a sharp curve in low RPM - TORQUE. How do you power up hill on a medium turn - TORQUE.

Street cars: most races are short. It is a contest of pulling your gears: TORQUE. Only a handfull race at really high speeds

An engine can produce all the power it wants to but without producing forward bite, it isn't much help. But you are right about the horsepower as well, most cars producing lots of torque have lots of horsepower. If you can produce more torque than your engine has horsepower, that is a very well built engine....and a fast one as well.

 

a race car that has more torque then horsepower is a poorlly tuned race car all cars make much more horsepower then they do torque top fuel dragseters are making up in the high 6 low 7 thousands of horsepower but only like 2-3 thousand ftbls of torque the same thing is with forumula 1, and also even stock car races

 

Poorly tuned? Explain this:
http://www.supercars.net/cars/1998@$...%20GTS-Rg.html
I guess since this car has more torque than horsepower it's poorly tuned. It doesn't matter if it won Le Mans.

 

Why can't people get past their biases for Honda and admit that there are some cars out there that are faster? If their honda doesn't have low end torque, its not necessary and any car that have it sucks, despite what the laws of physics would tell us. People comparing the slowest Mustang to a turbo h22 civic hatch running 15 lbs of boost is not going to be an interesting race, and it doesn't mean that all Civics are faster than all mustangs!!

 

HOLY FAWK!!! i leave for a couple days and this place turns into a shit storm full of ignorance, oh wait nevermind it was like that before i left. Im not gonna say that i dont defend my car and other domestics. But the "wars" on here are always started by the import people makin and ingnorant coments esspecailyl when they dont even know that much about domestics. Do you see me runnin around sayin " the new evos are slow" or "theres is no 2 liter on earth that can take my 5.7 liter" , no because i dont make ingnorant comments.There were to many things in this thread that i couldve quoted and proven wrong but im not in the mood for that right now, but any ingnorance after my post is fair game to be proven wrong. peace

 

nathan you are truly a moron the only reason that car has more torque then horsepower is because it is limited to 600hp like all lemans cars becasue of air restrictors then can't go over 600hp but the torque can even with air restrictors.

 

Civics are cooler than mustangs because civics have teh vtechs y0


and the sti is faster than a v6 95 mustang. since domestics are only good at being fast, that means that imports are better than domestics!!


:fawk:

 

This is freaking retarded. Just a quick review for the noobs.


A car only acclerates at the torque value available for that speed, that's what the engine can produce, and that's what you're getting out of it.

Horsepower is just an arbitrary term describing torque, but taking RPMs into play.

127 ft-lbs will never acclerate like 300 ft-lbs... but rev to 15,000 rpms, and the length of time its pulling will make up for it.


But I'm sure everyone knows that.

And dont hate on the domestic guys. They're here to keep this place somewhat real-world. Their cars come stock doing things your car was NEVER meant to do.

 

Part of the reason it works well with restrictors is because of the fact that it produces great torque. When you have sanctioning bodies with competitive restrictions like Lemans or Nascar, the only option is to learn how to build a strong engine with as much torque as you can.

Take this for example:

Put the RSX - S engine and the Mustang engine in the same weight stock car with NA restrictions as per normal race specifications. For argument case lets say that the RSX engine (which actually makes 220 or so) was producing 260hp the same as the Mustang but only producing 180 or 200 lb/ft Which car would run the oval faster and why? Obviously the Mustang powered car because it is producing 300 lb/ft vs the 200 lbft of the RSx powered car. This is the reason that 4 cyl cars do not race 8 cyl cars and the reason that it is an advantage to have 8cyls because of the torque. In real race situations with strict rules and specs (other than losely guided weekend sports car club races......or street races without rules) the basic engine building fundementals of displacement, good flowing heads, good camshaft profiles, and good manifolds will always be the key to winning races, because torque is what you are after. Under restriced, real racing guidelines an engine making more torque than horsepower (or as close to it as possible) is very efficient.

EDIT: Even with forced induction for street cars, the torque problem doesn't suddenly dissapear or do supernatural things. Turbo raises performance but only enhances the base it is boosting. They now make turbo units for the 2003 Cobra and this months 5.0 mag has one features which is pumping out 737 horses BUT produces 719 ft/lbs of torque. Same scenerio except with technology that maybe is more familiar to most people on this board.

 

that is true but torque can be made up for by excelent tunning and suspension thats why the ferrari 3.6 litres v8's beat out the corvette and vipers like 3 years in a row