On a 232 HP engine the difference of 60° to 100° is about 10 HP. Play with the RAD Calculator a little bit.

A good driver with sensetive feel can notice 4 HP, but barely. I can surely feel the difference between 65° and 90°, but the older I get the wider the spread needs to be. One way to identify those drivers is to watch them shift. To get the most accelleration often takes shifting at slightly different points. Those drivers can probably feel in the range of 1%.

 

you could feel 4-5 hp on a go-kart.

 

Are people mistaking a couple of bhp with increased throttle responce, does it fool your brain?

 

Define "increased throttle responce." If you mean "revs quicker while in gear," that my friend, is more torque! Viz, if you put a light flywheel in the car, you are putting more torque to the ground 'cause you are not wasting it on spinning up as much mass in your drivetrain. If you mean "revs quicker in neutral, " yes it could be placebo. If you mean you changed the map of the TPS so that the slope of the line mapping throttle position to petal position is steeper, then yes, this could aslo be placebo.

 

we have a new winner in the ''worst thread ever" category

 

agreed

 

Yeah, it should get a sticky

 

Reguardless of all the shananigans that you guys are thinking of:

Think of it this way. The bodily force sensor that is interpreting the G data from the change in horsepower, is none other than the inner ear. Thats quite a sensitve organ. Just think of how sensitive it needs to be to keep you standing straight up for any given period of time. The slightest movement is detected and corrected for through muscle contractions. Even in a submarine hitting a 30 up angle a person can stand up straight.

Some of you may be basing your responses on general skin nerve adaption and nerve cell density studies.

Needless to say, there wont be a definitive answer unless we had some sort of clinical trial with a population of at least 30.

 

Didn't you hear? You're not in control unless you're out of control.

 

What I mean is when you step on the pedal there is a slight hesitation, if you decrease the hesitation the power will feel more like a kick(say a vtec kick?) do you then perceive the kick as more power?
Also when changing the pulleys most people are resetting the ecu, this raises the afr which would lead to better engine responce & a slight increase of power(if i've read other posts right?)
When the fuel ratio is retrimmed over "x" amount of miles the power is then taken away, you're left with a lighter wallet & a car that revs quicker at idle.
Does this some it up ^

 

Good god people torque, HP? What you FEEL is FORCE or more correctly CHANGE in force on your body from the car pushing you. So let me ask this if the overall force across the entire rev. range increases by 10% would you feel that less than the force increasing by 20% in a 500rpm band? Does that mean that you can feel which of the two cars would have the faster 0-60 time?

that also begs the question how can you change how much force is put to the pavement? If torque is just ft lbs then what happens when I put 10" rims on the car? How many lbs of force am I putting to the pavement now? Have I increased the torque of the engine? Where does the force come from?(not mitichlorines) The article in RotaryGod's link has it right. Acceleration is a force. The equation is based on what our inner ear feels...force. What is the minimum force change you can detect? How do you change the force your inner ear experiences?

 

my brain hurts

 

They don't hear you.

 

The acceleration in 1st gear is dramatically improved over any other gear so I vote we all increase our torque by staying in first gear !

 

I am with MM on this. On cooler days the air is denser and you get better throttle response along with a happier engine.

There is a whole set of variables that change when it is cooler out, and they are not just felt by new cars with computers and sensors.

Can you feel 5 HP? Nope. Can you feel a more responsive engine when it is cooler out? Damn right!

 

In fact it is 50% humidity and 66F now. I may need to go for a Sunday drive...

 

Looking over some Data Acqusistion files it was clear that top drivers can feel the difference of 3/1000 of a G and control braking and turning consistently to about 10/1000's of a G. Looking at the Data for lessor drivers (top ten of 40) the sensitivity was about 1/10th as good. Maybe thats one of the keys to top shoes.

I can't say where 5HP fits on an RX8 in that, but it gives me the impression that for every one who can feel 5 HP there are 10 who can't.