MX-3.com

Hey, I am curious as to what exactly torque and horsepower are. I was told that there is better excelleration at max torque than at max horsepower. This seemed strange to me because it feals like I get a lot more excelleration at 6500rpm than at 4500rpm. I would really appreciate a discription of what torque and horsepower are.

You can find definitions of the two terms with Google. As for how they apply to your car.. well.. Torque is what gets you moving more or less. The higher your Torque.. the more force you have to spin your wheels. Horsepower is more of a measure of how much power your engine produces. Various things in our engines effect HP and Torque. Everything from VRIS points to Flywheel weight can make a difference.

The flywheel is a good example. A light flywheel will allow your engine to spin up faster and help produce more horsepower because there is less drag on your engine. A heavier flywheel will reduce HP but will increase low end torque due to the inertia of its rotational mass.

Basically.. Torque is what gets you moving.. Horsepower is sorta a measure of how quickly your engine will gain speed.

These are pretty crude descriptions.. others should be able to define it a bit better.

Tunes67

Horse power is how long it takes a horse to carry a 100 pound bucket up a shaft a given distance, or something like that. A very arbitrary number. Torque is how many pounds of thrust are exerted per square foot of contact patch. Hence torque being measured in pound/feet.

Main Entry: horse·pow·er
Pronunciation: 'hors-"pau(-&)r
Function: noun
1 : the power that a horse exerts in pulling
2 : a unit of power equal in the U.S. to 746 watts and nearly equivalent to the English gravitational unit of the same name that equals 550 foot-pounds of work per second

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/horsepower.htm



Main Entry: torque
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin torquEre to twist
1 : a force that produces or tends to produce rotation or torsion <an automobile engine delivers torque to the drive shaft>; also : a measure of the effectiveness of such a force that consists of the product of the force and the perpendicular distance from the line of action of the force to the axis of rotation
2 : a turning or twisting force

http://science.howstuffworks.com/fpte4.htm

Torque is how much work the motor can do, HP is how fast it can do that amont of work.
That is the best and easiest to understand explination I've ever heard.
So they both play a role in the speed and acceleration. They both play a role in how much a motor can pull, except that more torque is usually wanted b/c then the motor has a higher workload capacity.
So you cuold have 1000 ft/lbs of torque and only 1 hp, but it would take forever to get the motor to acutally do 1000 ft/lbs of work. You could have 1000 HP and only 1 ft/lb of torque and the motor would scream up to the point where it needed more than 1 ft/lb to do extra work.

Torque is a movie with Ice Cube in it...
Horsepower is an incredible horse, that can bite the hell out of some sugar cubes...

Notice Torque, and Horsepower have something in common....Cubes

I thought a generally good answer is that torque is power rotating and horsepower is forced or combustable power...

i was kind of always wondering.. as our engines get older do they lose power?? how much power would i be losing from a k8 that has 180km on it??

10001 ponies no one can no that answer everyone runs there motor differently some might grandma there motor and take really good care of it and have the same amount of power as they did when the motor was brand new

Only way to measure the power loss would be to dyno it fresh and then dyno it over time.

The answer is yes our engines lose power over time for various reasons.. valves not fully seating, compression rings wearing out.. anything that can cause a loss of compression will cause an equal loss of power. Also as our engines wear.. friction increases in areas.. friction equals increased drag and this also saps power. Usually with proper maintenance.. this power loss is largely unnoticed until something major goes bad and we consider either writing the engine off as done or we rebuild it.

Proper oil changes & tune ups help any engine live a longer life.

Tunes67

Horse Power sells cars
Torque wins races

Not all cars need a crapload of torque though. As long as your car is light, you wont need 302ft torque to run low 14s at the 1/4mile. Its very common for imports (espically CRXs and Integras) to have something like 190hp/115ft torque and be able to run low/high 14s (CRXs). Well ofcourse, thats because those two cars a pretty light espically the CRX (2000lbs) unlike Mustangs or Camaros that weigh 3500lbs