Fast road cams o_0

In news:ckjr7d$pa3$ snipped-for-privacy@news5.svr.pol.co.uk, REMUS decided to enlighten our sheltered souls with a rant as follows

If you're on about the Golf, the early Mk2 GTis are like that. It's the later EFi ones that were s**te. The gearing is a bit short on them, mine used to do 120ish in 5th, but it'd struggle to hit a ton in 4th.

Then again, you could have had mine for much less money....

Mk2's do that mate. the one i had recently struggled to do 95-100 in 4th but would happily (and quite quickly) go off the clock in 5th.

generally you get more power with a fast road, higher in the rev range. This means they're not so torquey in the low revs, have to rev them to get them off the line.

Hmmm. They're designed to liberate more output, typically from medium engine speeds upwards. It may or may not influence maximum speed, depending on the gearing. If the gearing is short and you're reaching the limiter in top gear, it's not going to increase maximum speed. If it produces more power at the engine speed that corresponds to maximum speed, then you will increase it - but only slightly.

The amount of power required to increase maximum speed rises to the square of the higher speed. Or something like that, heh.

Assuming gearing is none-wierd - If you want 2x the top speed, then you need

If a 100bhp car can hit 100mph, then it would need 800bhp to hit 200mph - again, this assumes that gearing is all sensible.

The cube of the speed. Drag force increases as speed squared, but power is force*speed, so power goes as (speed*speed)*speed = speed cubed.

Of course, as you said, most cars aren't actually geared to reach Vmax at Pmax, so the max speed is lower than indicated by the power output&drag coefficient.

You sure he didn't put it in third :-)

Peter

-- "The truth is working in television is not very glamorous at all. I just go home on my own at night and sit alone and eat crisps."

Glad to hear it was OK. I'm really, really surprised but I guess it's a good reason to be less pessimistic ;)

On the subject of fast road cams, really I would not expect it to make a massive difference without other modifications - I've even read reports of certain makes being worse than standard cams.

Chris.

I remember in my Dedra I filled up with Total (not even their Super Plus) unleaded. On my drive away from the Petrol station, at times I was in 5th gear but kept was searching for 5th as I thought I was in 4th! The accel was staggering. Weird - next tank of Total I bought didn't have that effect.

Didn't catch this untill now, i'm still in the market for a GTi, how much do you want for it? I was saving for a bass guitar amp, but cars are so much more important!