Help explaining horsepower and torque feel

[Coyotes55086]

So when supercharging a car (s550) stock being 435hp and 400lb trq , the car say can go to 650hp and 500lb trq
. What do you notice in the ride ? is it the horsepower or the torque ?

what would be the difference in a ride that is say 500hp 700lb trq vs the opposite ratio 700hp vs 500ft torque? is there a difference in feel here ? or do they feel the same?

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[Coyotes55086]

anyone ?

 

[3beeps]

 

[4V Mayhem]

Torque what pushes your head into the headrest. WIth more torque you will notice much more acceleration. So the setup with more torque will roast the tires and when it catches it'll be glorious. Horsepower is more like what gives you top speed. So you do not really feel horsepower. You feel torque.

 

[SplawnDarts]

Torque is a bad way to think about engine power because it's affected by gearing. Horsepower is not. What you really want to look at is the horsepower at the rpm and throttle position you are operating at. That's what will tell you what the car will do.

Say my car is running at 60mph in 3rd gear at 3500 rpm or whatever and I stomp on it. The power my engine makes at 3500 rpm and WOT determines how fast I accelerate. If I get a new engine that makes 2x the power under those conditions, I will accelerate twice as fast. If I downshift to second and the engine makes 50% more power at the new operating point (say WOT and 5500 rpm) I'll accelerate 50% faster.

 

[SplawnDarts]

Torque what pushes your head into the headrest. WIth more torque you will notice much more acceleration. So the setup with more torque will roast the tires and when it catches it'll be glorious. Horsepower is more like what gives you top speed. So you do not really feel horsepower. You feel torque.

No. Back to physics 1 for you

 

[4V Mayhem]

No. Back to physics 1 for you

I don't think so. But thanks anyway.

 

[Coyotes55086]

Torque is a bad way to think about engine power because it's affected by gearing. Horsepower is not. What you really want to look at is the horsepower at the rpm and throttle position you are operating at. That's what will tell you what the car will do.

Say my car is running at 60mph in 3rd gear at 3500 rpm or whatever and I stomp on it. The power my engine makes at 3500 rpm and WOT determines how fast I accelerate. If I get a new engine that makes 2x the power under those conditions, I will accelerate twice as fast. If I downshift to second and the engine makes 50% more power at the new operating point (say WOT and 5500 rpm) I'll accelerate 50% faster.

So for the sake of understanding this ... if this was even possible for examples same , If a supercharger adds 250hp but no torque , will you still feel a change in the car ?

 

[Burkey]

So for the sake of understanding this ... if this was even possible for examples same , If a supercharger adds 250hp but no torque , will you still feel a change in the car ?

To add 250hp, you MUST add either torque or rpm.
Torque is what pushes your car. It is literally the only force involved here. Hp is a calculation based on torque at a given rpm.
If you double the torque for a given rpm, you’ve doubled the hp at that same rpm, or, you could make half the torque at double the rpm and still have the same hp.

A better explanation would be this:
Torque is THE motive force.
Horsepower allows you to hold lower gears for longer, thereby allowing you to capitalise on increased torque at the wheels for a longer period.

Here‘s a calculator if you want to play with the numbers for yourself.
https://spicerparts.com/calculators/horsepower-torque-calculator

 

[ponie1992]

You don't "feel" HP or torque. What you feel are their effects on the car and how it accelerates. Your body and brain don't know the difference. All you truly know is the car is faster and pushes you into the seat more.

 

[Burkey]

You don't "feel" HP or torque. What you feel are their effects on the car and how it accelerates. Your body and brain don't know the difference. All you truly know is the car is faster and pushes you into the seat more.

You ”feel” the impact of torque at the wheels. You don’t “feel” horsepower in any way shape or form.
Peak acceleration for a given gear occurs at peak torque. Period.
Dyno chart from a Camaro below to graphically illustrate for the OP how the peak accel happens early (in this case) but the driver will hold the gear regardless, cos he wants to capitalise on the torque multiplication of that gear, rather than shift up.

 

[Dominant1]

If it were all about torque then everyone would have a single big turbo. Horsepower and torque kinda go hand & hand. I look at it like this torque makes a 60ft monster, hp makes trap speeds.. example i has a set of worn out dr’s that didn’t hook until the 330ft mark . I ran an 11.0 flat at 137 mph my 60ft was 1.9 because i was spinning. That same run with a 1.5 60ft (hooking) would have netted me a low 10 second run and a 140mph trap speed. I mean i was blowing the tires off and still trapped 137mph. That’s hp.. torque wins the 60ft battle when hooking but hp wins the race..

 

[Coyotes55086]

To add 250hp, you MUST add either torque or rpm.
Torque is what pushes your car. It is literally the only force involved here. Hp is a calculation based on torque at a given rpm.
If you double the torque for a given rpm, you’ve doubled the hp at that same rpm, or, you could make half the torque at double the rpm and still have the same hp.

A better explanation would be this:
Torque is THE motive force.
Horsepower allows you to hold lower gears for longer, thereby allowing you to capitalise on increased torque at the wheels for a longer period.

Here‘s a calculator if you want to play with the numbers for yourself.
https://spicerparts.com/calculators/horsepower-torque-calculator

thanks so much for this explanation I think I'm starting to understand

 

[Coyotes55086]

If it were all about torque then everyone would have a single big turbo. Horsepower and torque kinda go hand & hand. I look at it like this torque makes a 60ft monster, hp makes trap speeds.. example i has a set of worn out dr’s that didn’t hook until the 330ft mark . I ran an 11.0 flat at 137 mph my 60ft was 1.9 because i was spinning. That same run with a 1.5 60ft (hooking) would have netted me a low 10 second run and a 140mph trap speed. I mean i was blowing the tires off and still trapped 137mph. That’s hp.. torque wins the 60ft battle when hooking but hp wins the race..

You know what, I think this makes perfect sense if I understand correctly. Horsepower is all the power being generated to the wheels. When all that power is grounded through the tires and you hook up, that's where torque finally accelerates the car forward?

 

[SplawnDarts]

So for the sake of understanding this ... if this was even possible for examples same , If a supercharger adds 250hp but no torque , will you still feel a change in the car ?

OK, the first thing you need to understand is that you always need to be thinking "at the operating point". So say you installed a supercharger and it added 250 HP, and let's say this is on a Coyote, and that both the before and after numbers were measured at 7500 RPM. Now, you need the basic formula for HP and torque which is HP = Torque * rotation speed. With imperial units of ft-lbs and RPM you need a correction factor, so the formula is HP = T * RPM / 5252. That's why the HP and torque lines on a dyno graph always cross at 5252 by the way. We can also turn that around and get T = HP * 5252 / RPM

So we've got our two engines running at 7500 RPM:
power(old) = 460hp
power(new) = 710hp

and by formula we can calculate torque:

torque(old) = 322 ft-lbs at 7500 RPM
torque(new) =497 ft-lbs at 7500 RPM

Either of these numbers will tell you equally well what happened to your acceleration, because they both increased by the same ratio.

Now where this gets complicated and more than a little silly is that generally we don't report torque and HP at the same operating point (RPM) because we like big numbers more than we like understanding what's going on. So it's possible that peak torque on this new engine didn't increase, or increase much because it's at a different RPM. On a stock Coyote peak torque is about 410 lb-ft at 4200 RPM give or take. So if your supercharger didn't improve that operating point at all,then 7500 RPM (or somewhere in between) would become the new torque peak and the torque increase would be small. But that doesn't really mean anything.

What people really mean when they say an engine has a lot of torque is that it makes more power at lower RPMs where most non-racing driving takes place. Such engines give you high acceleration without having to shift to use high RPMs. But if an engine has high power at high RPMs and you have a transmission that lets you shift your operating point there, you will get high acceleration. Remember- F1 engines are low torque, high redline, high HP engines and they accelerate like mad.

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