This says it all
http://www.planet-f1.com/news/story_22132.shtml
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Yep the never ending debate about torque vs power figures is pointless, what you really need is to know how the engine behaves on the usable rpm range, hence you need torque vs rpm or power vs rpm, but they are the same thing, obviously from one you can obtain the other and viceversa.wizzels wrote: Tom,
While generally what you say about torque vs. HP holds true for the general public, you also have to look at what those torque and HP figures mean. If you have an engine that produces 200 HP at 8500 RPM, and its redline is 9000, what does that engine's torque curve look like? You cant neccessarily talk about HP and jump to a conclusion about the usability of that number. Take a look at Valencia, for example. Kimi was fastest around that track by more than 0.5 sec. with what we believe to be about 30-35 HP less than the most "powerful" competition. More factors are involved in determining how an engine performs than just the plain HP and TQ figures.
Well I will throw my 2 cents worth into this. First its important to know that it is not possible to increase Hp with out increasing torque. If you gained 5HP at 19000rpm then you had to have gained torque. It my be as little as say .001 ftlb, but it had to gain it. I will work on a graph with the math formulas as soon as I get a moment. I will say this really quickly. If the Cosworth V10 is making the same or even a little less Hp say 20-25, but is reving to a max of 17000RPM where the V8's are reving to 19000 then once geared properly, the V10 will have a hugh advantage because it will have a bunch more torque through that RPM range. When I get the graph together and post it, it will make sense.Reca wrote:Yep the never ending debate about torque vs power figures is pointless, what you really need is to know how the engine behaves on the usable rpm range, hence you need torque vs rpm or power vs rpm, but they are the same thing, obviously from one you can obtain the other and viceversa.wizzels wrote: Tom,
While generally what you say about torque vs. HP holds true for the general public, you also have to look at what those torque and HP figures mean. If you have an engine that produces 200 HP at 8500 RPM, and its redline is 9000, what does that engine's torque curve look like? You cant neccessarily talk about HP and jump to a conclusion about the usability of that number. Take a look at Valencia, for example. Kimi was fastest around that track by more than 0.5 sec. with what we believe to be about 30-35 HP less than the most "powerful" competition. More factors are involved in determining how an engine performs than just the plain HP and TQ figures.
For car performance then what you really need to know is power vs car velocity or torque (at the wheel) vs car velocity, both depending by gearing obviously.
Both graphs again give the same info and are equally useful, it’s a matter of preference which one to choose; I prefer power vs velocity just because it’s easier to read, power maximum value doesn’t depend by gear ratio (besides minimal variations due to slightly different transmission efficiency) and the max possible acceleration is with engine always at max power rpm (you can achieve it only with an ideal CVT obviously), hence you have an horizontal line as reference to compare your engine + gearing with the ideal solution.
The torque at the wheel on the contrary, being torque at the crank times the gear ratio, is very high at the left side of the graph, low speed, and very low at the right side, high speed, so the graph needs to be lot larger if you want good resolution; then the reference curve for maximum possible acceleration is an hyperbole tangent to the different torque curves, not as easily manageable as an horizontal line.
But again it’s a matter of preference, both graphs give exactly the same info and you need to know one of them to have an idea of car performance, a single figure, being it max power or max torque, will never do, it’s like describing a person just knowing his height.
BTW, we’ll hardly receive such kind of info from F1 teams...
BTW 2 : welcome
But even if they increase the reduction level regarding of TR performance, this could still spoil the first race, no?manchild wrote:I think that it was announced by FIA that reduction of V10 is not final and that reduction will be increased if the performace of V10 gets close to V8.
