Torque vs Horsepower. I like Torque!

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Chris142

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Jun 5, 2003
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Apple Valley, California
Yesterday I had to use my 1973 I.H. pickup to rescue a friend.

He has a Scout and it threw a rod 250 miles away.

I rented a trailer complete with chains and the gizmo's to chain the broken Scout to the trailer.

My truck weighs 5200lbs, the trailer had a empty weight of 2800lbs and the Scout weighs 4500lbs. Throw in all the extra stuff plus my 250 lb friend and I'm sure I was kissin 13,000lbs.

We got the Scout loaded up and rolling towards home.

I realized that my old POS truck would grind up some pretty steep hills w/o downshifting. A couple of hours later we were passed by a newer f-250 pulling a Jeep on a U-Haul trailer. I noticed that their trailer had aluminum on it where mine had 1/4 inch steel plate.

We came to a pretty steep hill. I was able to maintain 62mph......We passed the F-250 in the slow lane!

Once over the top he blew by us...Untill we came to another hill. This one was pretty good and I dropped to 3rd gear and held 50mph.

F-250 was doing about 20mph in the slow lane with his 4-ways on! I mean we blew by him on this one!

We done this leapfrog thing a few more times, the last time they passed me they rolled down the passengers window and gave us a thumbs up
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A good mate of mine Ivan Walker builds racing engines (good ones too). He has a good saying "torque wins races, horsepower sells engines". Nobody ever comes to him and says "I want 650 ftlb torqe" they just want horsepower. He builds a mean 372/410 CI sprintcar engine!
 
Fully agree with your friend, a tractable, torquey engine in a tight track would be unbeatable, one of the reasons big low revving, properly geared diesel engines are such pleasure to drive.
 
That 5.4L V8 is a big gas suckin dog! Had one in our Expedition. Gutless. I put alot of $ into trying to get more power, helped a little, but overall a gutless wonder. I like Ford's, but that has got to be the weakest V8 on the road! I hear they improved it in 2004.
 
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Originally posted by 55:
My brother always tries to tell me torque doesn't matter, then again he IS a Honduh driver!
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Yeah, we'll see if he's singing that same tune when I waste him off the line in my Monte (215 peak torque with over 200 available from 1500 rpm on up).

J/k, of course. I certainly don't condone street racing. I do like getting my way when accelerating away from lights, though.
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quote:
Hmmm. I like my Cherokee's low-end snort; I believe about 225 ft/lbs at a ridiculously low engine speed.....
another reason to love the 4.0.
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Yes, we're in "flatland" with the 4.0
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Well ..I'd say that although you can't really have one without the other....You can have massive torque ..and virtually NO hp....while torque is always, as your formula shows, ..a fundamental of hp.

Torque is (can be) independant of speed. HP is variable with speed.

You can mulitply torque. You cannot muliply hp.
 
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