torque=the power and engine has
HP=How well the engine can put the torque to work

if 2 cars with the same amout of torque but one has more HP the one with more HP will "win"

torque is twisting power. or acceleration.

horsepower is how much power is put down over a length of time, or distance.

they are directly tied together, and if you pay attention to them (and I don't mean peak numbers) you can get an idea of a car's acceleration and how fast it is. If you look at only peak numbers, you can easily be deceived. Having a lot of one without the other isn't cool. e.g; 600 lbs/tq and 120 hp = teh suq.


I think the analogy is something like:

Torque is how hard you can smash a car into a wall
Horse power is how fast you're going when you hit the wall.

or something like that :)

Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall. Torque is how far you push the wall.

but yeah. haha. funny quote.

(although that still doesnt seem right, i dunno..)

Horsepower is the arm, torque is the lever. If you want to remove a stuck bolt, is it better to have a strong arm, or a long wrench? It's best to have both, too little of either is limiting.

Piston engines generally have more leverage than rotaries, because of how they convert reciprocating motion into rotational motion. But rotaries produce much more power for their size than piston engines.

torque is a direct result of the length of the combustion chamber. i.e. displacement.

more displacement = more torque.

Wikipedia strike again! Wrong, the early 2.0L redlined at 8900, the 2.2L redlines at 8000rpm.

such wit...

torque is this...horsepower is that....this thread is elite

your not allowed to post anymore....:squint:

Power to wieght ratio combined with a manual trans and different gear ratios and RWD = 4 seconds off of a 0-60 time.

You stopped coming to forums yet he has over 1200 posts huh Yeah i stopped too!

Nope, it doesn't. It's reasonably close, but the physics is a bit off.

Velocity is how fast you hit the wall. Torque is how HARD you push the wall, assuming the car isn't totaled.

Horsepower is energy output per unit of time. It is roughly proportional to force times velocity (work = force * distance, power = work/time = force * distance / time = force * velocity ... these simple expressions quickly break down if the force isn't constant).

Horsepower is a primary factor determining the car's maximum cruising speed, so, yes, it's how fast you hit the wall. (The force is constant at that point, so the simple math works mostly right.)

The torque part of the expression is definitely off, though, because if you stop pushing the wall after a certain distance, the torque at that point is zero. Torque is as most others have posted: it's force times a lever arm. That's useful because then you can just take the torque value, change your gearing/levers, and have whatever amount of force (pushing) you want for the occasion: high force in low gear, low force in high gear.

Another way to look at it is that tractors don't care about horsepower so much as torque: they don't need to go fast, they just need to be able to go at all, pulling a heavy load. An interesting side note in this regard is that John Deere looked into using rotary engines a long while back (http://cp_www.tripod.com/rotary/pg11.htm): seems they didn't have enough torque.

The expression is:

Torque is how hard you hit the wall.
Horsepower is how far you push it.

If you can put that power to the ground, I had 245 azenis rt615s on my 307 hp rx8 with the feed 4.77 gears. Both first and second gear had no traction if I gave it more than 50% throttle.

This car may accelerate better with traction control turned all the way off, as in the idiot light illuminating that shows the car skiding after holding the button for a few seconds. I wonder if this car is just held back all the time? I would assume most don't know about that "secret" ability.

The most important factors here are
weight & area under the HP/torque curve in the rpm range you will operate .

If you are changing gear at 9000 and it drops down to say 5500 when you change into 2nd ,
you need to find the area under the curve in the 5500 to 9000rpm range then compare that against the other car .

Why are we going thru this again ............. this is old ............

imagine you have a motor sitting on a mount, and it's running, flywheel exposed.


Then take some clamps, or brake calipers or whatever, and squeeze the flywheel. The force required to slow it down shows you the actual rotational force, independent of rpm,(Although different at every rpm) being offered by the motor.

Now, take what you get from that and factor in the speed (RPM) of the flywheel. The faster it's spinning, the better. That is your horsepower. Torque X RPM.


You can imagine, that for a given amount of rotational force being offered, the faster it is spinning, the better. This allows for engines with identical torque to perform very differently, since you can gear a car twice as low and reach the same speeds in each gear if you have twice the RPM available.

So here you can see how torque and horsepower numbers work.

Frontier + Chance = Good answer guys!

^^^ that's a good way to think about it, rengen

I think you're confusing displacement with the length of the stroke. A longer stroke gives more torque, but I believe that's due to increased leverage rather than the displacement.

A larger displacement does mean more power though, that's true. But torque involves leverage, and so a longer stroke can give you more torque even if the displacement remains the same.