and someone who...also... had an impressive impact on automotive racing and design over the last 50 years. Starting out amateur, he soon became a driver for the Cad-Allard, Aston Martin, and Maserati teams during the 1950s. Driving for Donald Healey, in a streamlined and supercharged, specially-modified, Austin-Healey 100S, he set 16 U.S. and international speed records. Teamed with Roy Salvadori, and driving for Aston Martin, he won the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans.
He drove in the Mount Washington Hillclimb Auto Race in a specially prepared Ferrari roadster, to a record run of 10:21.8 seconds on his way to victory in 1956.
He was Sports Illustrated's driver of the year in 1956 and 1957.
He competed in Formula One from 1958 to 1959, participating in a total of eight World Championship races and several non-championship races.
Carroll shelby....Im pretty sure he has some physics knowledge but its strictly from hands-on experience.
Well to start, Carroll Shelby was not an engineer. He was a driver who ended up dropping big blocks into random cars.
Id like to think that hes probably a pretty smart guy, and that the whole reason he would say such a thing would be just to put it in simple terms that
The fact is that torque is absolutely meaningless without RPM.
If I hopped on a bicycle with 1 foot radius stroke on the pedals I could put down a ground pounding 175 ft/lbs of torque to the road, more than a lot of cars put out.
Last time I checked a bicycle is not as fast as a car, so obviously torque is not the fundamental force to be looking at.
What really accelerates a car is the
volume of the torque curve, within the RPM range that th car will operate in based on its gearing and shift points.
As it turns out, it is almost alwasy the case that you can gain more and more volume by gearing lower if you are reving to a higher RPM and holding the torque into that range.
Coincidentally this also means that the engine will produce more power as calculated by torque and RPM.
Lets take Formula 1 for example. They have a strict limitation on engine displacement and are limited to natural aspiration. This means that the have a maximum amount of torque possible based on their brake mean effective pressure. So in order to get the most from their engines they rev them as high as possible and make them breathe as high as possible in order to get the widest flattest torque band (even if peak torque suffers horribly)
This is why a Formula 1 engine puts out 700+hp and only a messily 200 ft/lbs of torque.
Reving to 18,000 RPM they are able to gear the transmission extremely short essentially multiplying the torque at the wheels, and allowing for extraordinary acceleration.
In conclusion.
Peak power may not be the fundamental measurement of a cars acceleration, but it does usually correspond to a larger torque volume. So because of that, it is a useful benchmarking tool
Peak torque is an absolutely useless measurement.
