You also presumably know that you can vary torque by adding a gearbox. If you have an engine that provides 200 ft-lbs, you can double it, treble it, get ten times as much torque. Just add a 2:1, 3:1, 10:1 gearbox. No extra fuel, no energy required, just tack on a few cogs and you've got virtually any amount of torque you like.
2000 ft-lbs? No problem sir. Are you sure you don't want more?
But it makes no sense to compare the acceleration of petrol and diesel cars in the same gear. All other things being equal, you can make whichever one you like look better by a suitable choice of gear.
I think he's implying that 20bhp is a lot of transmission loss.
A swift bout of bistromathics says that's about 15%. Given that none of the numbers anyone's banding about are very precise, it doesn't sound too unreasonable to me.
I'm sure I've seen people quoting much more optomistic figures after a visit to a rolling road on here.
Can someone explain why anyone would spend time and money trying to hot rod some antiquated POS when after all that effort they *still* end up with an engine that can barely match a diesel mondeo?
Why not start out with a car with a decent engine instead of trying to polish a turd?
Thats slightly different though - he didn't spend 100K trying to coax that power out of a 2 litre 4 pot , he binned the POS under the bonnet and put a proper engine in :)
When I did it, it was between '88 and '92, so the car was 11 years old.
If I'd dropped a Rover V8 in (my favoured choice) I'd have knocked about £2000 off the value of the car then, and about £5000 off it's equivalent value now.
I did put a Rover V8 in a Mk2 Escort, but not an RS.
Yeah - if the point is to make the car more fun why do you care about the resale value?
And why is it that the smaller and weedier the engine, the more likely a manufacturer is to slap "sport" moniker on a car? Do they think that this will stop people noticing that they've just been overtaken by a milk float?
snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
You seem to forget that 1300 would have been towards the upper end of the engine range in a Mk2 Escort. Think 1.8 Zetec S Focus. It's only because cars have got so bloaty that they now need such big engines. Hell, you could get 1300 Cortinas, 1100 Escorts and 950 Fiestas.
What's the smallest Fester now? 1.25? Probably weighs a shitload more than a Mk2 'scrote, too.
A 1.6 Mk2 'scrote would have been roughly equivalent, in range- positioning, to a 2.0 Focus now, with the RS2000 equivalent to the ST.
I got 155 bhp or thereabout from the 2.0, a standard Rover V8 is 160ish bhp (182bhp in 10.5:1 early P6 tune, 135 bhp in Stromberg equipped Range Rover tune, 160ish in SD1 tune) . Ok, the Rover lump is tuneable and provides a lot more torque, but the Escort only weighs around 820kg anyway so the lack of torque wasn't that important [1]. To spend a few weeks fitting a Rover lump would have made it more fun, but it wouldn't make it much quicker than it was already. So, combined with the cost of conversion and the cost of parts it wasn't a viable thing to do to an immaculate and sought after car. Especially when it would have lost about 50% of its market value at the time.
It's a trim level. Although, with the admittedly puny 1.3 Kent lump, the Sport (and the Ghia) did produce more power and torque than 'non' sport versions. A whole throbbing 72 bhp instead of 55 bhp, so close to 30% more. The 'Sport' had uprated Sachs dampers, and wider wheels than the standard Mk2, a twin choke Weber instead of a VV carb, a four branch exhaust manifold and a slightly larger exhaust system.
Therefore the 1300 Sport is indeed sportier than the non-Sport. The Ghia had the same amount of power but weighed more and had softer springs. This means the 1300 Sport is the sportiest of the 1300s.
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