| wheels so the torque you are putting down falls off as you go faster and faster. Although the actual torque to the wheels falls off as you upshift, the horsepower at the wheels does not because the wheels are spinning faster (you will also note this on a dyno as HP does not change based on gearing). The actuality of lower acceleration as speed increases is mostly because of aerodynamic forces holding you back, and they are quite significant; well over 100HP lost to acceleration around 100MPH (if my memory serves correctly from my DAQ setup in the car; I setup a wind-loss program based on speed, Cf, frontal area, but the losses were significant. There are many other frictional losses I'm not accounting for here either. And losses exponentially increase as you go faster. If you were to account for all frictional losses, had perfect traction, calculated inertial forces of a quickly spinning engine into work for the launch once the clutch is released, and how much horsepower you were making over the used engine RPM, you could calculate the ET and MPH of the car in the 1320'. You would also then find that if you had the same car which produced more horsepower through the range of RPM it was running within, independent of torque, it would get there faster and with a higher MPH. I agree with you totally and trying to show that if all things are equal, higher horsepower over the range of RPM used will be faster. Gearing factors, shift points, suspension, traction, etc, are all the other variables I'm keeping out because they are independent of the simplified nature of work. It is interesting that the guys with NA differentials appear to run better 1/4mile times and MPH. Closer gearing ratios dont trade off as much torque per upshift, but at the same time the engine is covering a narrower range of RPM in each gear where the horsepower generated in that RPM would likely be at its highest. It does become confusing, really... because you think of grearing as torque multiplication, not horsepower multiplication, and then it loses context because torque isn't work. :-/
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00:44:21 01/20/04
