What would you do if you were starting again?

MarkTurbo

Well-Known Member
A 100 bhp advantage is going to open up a lot of ground accelerating from 30-100mph over and over.
Exactly. You can be quick through the corners but once you get to a straight the quicker car will pull away especially as on most tracks you'll spend more time going straight than cornering. The instructor at castle combe will always throw that question in at a briefing and the majority of people will wrongly say that the better handling car will be quicker.
 

Tim

New Member
Combe is a power circuit so not really comparable to others around the country, my initial post was said in jest, ofcourse if you have a well setup car, more HP and you are pretty handy behind the wheel, then the same car with less HP will not be as quick.

But the majority of people who throw money at increasing power, use that increased power to make up for their lack of ability behind the wheel. There is a lot ot be said for seat time, and being quick around a circuit isn't a given with 300+ hp, tell that to the Evo drivers that like to get in my way at track days. The same can be said to people in known handling cars, the Exige at Donington that was one of the slowest cars out there, or the VX220 Turbo who I had lap after lap of swapping places with at Silverstone South.

One of my friends drives a very developed Golf 2, it has around 180hp, runs slicks and has some very interesting aero, but he shows a clean pair of heals to quite a lot of high power stuff at track days. Some of that is the tyres, but a heap of it is because he knows how to pedal and has done thousands of track miles in the car.
 

red reading

Active Member
Your all forgetting about driveability, power is useless without driveability. you need a good spread of power to be quick.
 

red reading

Active Member
Even gearing couldn't hide a peaky high hp engine......................unless you have 10 gears..lol

Carl your car will hit 135ish with the low ratio box and 280bhp , if you had 500bhp and the same gearing the car will rev faster than you can change gear...so you run longer ratio's,then with longer ratio's and a narrow power curve you then run the risk of dropping out of the power (as i had at bob's sprint day), every gearing combination is a compromise...unless you have a broader power curve then it become's less critical on the ratio's selected for each gear.

With all the bikes i have owned when tuning them i try to get more power but more importantley more area under the curve it actually means that if the engine makes it's power earlier in the rev range that it revs faster and harder than a engine making the same power later. i will be doing the same with my car now as it makes the power i want i just want the engine to make it sooner.
 

Fast Guy

Moderators
Staff member
Even gearing couldn't hide a peaky high hp engine......................unless you have 10 gears..lol

Carl your car will hit 135ish with the low ratio box and 280bhp , if you had 500bhp and the same gearing the car will rev faster than you can change gear...so you run longer ratio's,then with longer ratio's and a narrow power curve you then run the risk of dropping out of the power (as i had at bob's sprint day), every gearing combination is a compromise...unless you have a broader power curve then it become's less critical on the ratio's selected for each gear.

With all the bikes i have owned when tuning them i try to get more power but more importantley more area under the curve it actually means that if the engine makes it's power earlier in the rev range that it revs faster and harder than a engine making the same power later. i will be doing the same with my car now as it makes the power i want i just want the engine to make it sooner.

Well I was thinking F1.:lol:

Mine only hits 123mph. With my gearbox on the 1/4m with 500bhp, simply adding cams (obviously the other head work too) to increase my rev limit to 8500rpm (139mph as I'd never hit it) would be more than enough. On a track it would probably be different. If you mess with final drive ratios as well, not just the gearing, you should be able to hit a decent compromise where you're geared long enough, but don't drop too far between gears. But it depends what you want from the car, top speed, acceleration, etc.
 

vpulsar

Well-Known Member
My first pulsar used max out at 127 mph, And that's what I was doing when a piston went through the block lol.

My second pulsar had a quaife box which had slightly closer ratio's from 1st to 4th and a standard 5th I believe, But as red riding hood has suggested I used to run out of gears very quickly indeed with over 500 bhp, But by the time you where in 4th you where traveling very fast indeed lol. In the end it was a car in which I was either going to prison or going to kill myself and is why it's no more!


John
 
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