Leaderboard

Children: you spend the first two years of their life teaching them to walk and talk...then the next sixteen years telling them to sit down and shut up. Just a little humor from one dad to another. Congrats again on the new addition.

The factor I would consider is the area under the curve. That is the average HP you have from when you drop the clutch to your shift point, grab a gear you get an RMP drop, you rev again till you hit the next shift point. Take the area under the curve between the low and the high RPM and you have your effective HP. How can more gear hurt you? The motor has inertia the lower the gear the faster the rate of change for the motor, that faster rate of change absorbs power. At some point the benifts of better gearing are outweighed by the HP the motor is storing as it revs up. So when you gear lower and go slower you have two thing to look at: 1: Should I take some mass out of my motor to reduce inertia? 2: Is it an issue with how fast the turbo spools? It has intertia and is affected by the faster acceleration as well. HP defines the ability to do work, area under the curve defines the effective HP as the RPMs change. A better statement might be the vehicle with the greatest effective HP will be the fastest. Kevin