4.1    General

4.1.1    Some important words about 0-60 acceleration times.

All this talk (and heat) over 0-60 times isn't really worth a lot of hand wringing or bandwidth. That said, here are a couple of facts re 0-60 times:

The first item is that Car & Driver, Road & Track and Motor Trend all "zero" their measured times to the drag strip. That is to say, they all allow about a foot of rollout before they actually start the clock. The average street car on street tires takes about four tenths of a second to roll this distance - perhaps a tad less for something powerful with really good traction (such as a Porsche), but still more than three tenths.  Therefore, if you're testing 0-60s with a Vericom or other accurate instrument, the Car & Driver time of 7.5 seconds converts to around 7.9 seconds. If you're using a driver-held stop watch activated at first clutch lift, figure maybe 8.1 or so, assuming your speedometer is accurate. (As a by the way, I've found that many Neon speedos are a bit happy, registering 62-63 at an actual 60.)

To put it another way, if Car & Driver ran that 0-60 test on the '98 R/T with their own measurement system, plus a Vericom, plus a driver-held stop watch, they'd get 7.5, about 7.9, and about 8.1 seconds, respectively - same car, same run.  Car & Driver and Motor Trend also correct their times to "standard day" conditions. Road & Track doesn't.

People in this file are measuring (or estimating) 0-60 times using different means, under different conditions, so the moral is: don't get crazy if you can't hit 60 in 7.5 seconds, or 6.0 seconds, or whatever.  See next for why you really shouldn't care.

The second thing about 0-60 is that it's IMMATERIAL. The only thing you can say about a car that does 0-60 quicker than another car is that there's a better than 50% chance that it will be ahead at that time.  The *only* thing.  Time to speed is something completely different than time to distance, so there's no telling with certainty who will be ahead at a given speed, based only on time to speed differences.  The "quicker" car may very well be behind at 60.

As an example of how this works, my R/T (and I assume all 5-speed DOHC Neons) needs a two-three shift before it gets to 60.  This will slow the 0-60 time by the time needed for the shift. If Chrysler regeared the final drive ratio in the DOHC just enough so that it could touch 60 in second gear, it would very likely show a slightly improved 0-60 time - but it would almost certainly be *behind* the stock DOHC car at the time, because it would be a tad slower off the line.

As another example, my last Vette (a '93 LT-1 six-speed coupe) was very quick, and I ran it a fair bit at New England Dragway in order to see how quick I could go while 100% stock.  From time to time, I'd line up with another guy who had a stock '94 LT-1 auto - also very quick.  With similar reaction times, better overall gearing in first gear, and a 1.68:1 torque multiplier (at stall) in his stock torque converter, he'd pretty much always pull me off the line (1.86 best 60 foot against my 1.91 best), and keep pulling until somewhere near the top of his first gear (around 45 mph). Then I'd stop him and begin pulling him back, catching him near the top of my second gear, somewhere near 70 mph.  The implication? Pretty simple, really. I beat him to 60, and I was behind at the time.

A final example (and a pop quiz):

If car A gets to 100 in 13.2 seconds, and to 108 in about 14.7 seconds, while car B gets to 100 in about 11.8 seconds and to 108 in 13.2 seconds, who's ahead at 100?

Answer: Car A, in this case.  Car A was a slightly modified (more boost) GMC Syclone AWD pickup in the right lane down at Atco Dragway, and car B was me in my LT-1 in the left lane.  We launched together, but he came out like a ball bearing out of a slingshot with AWD and preload-generated boost (1.72 60-foot against my 1.94), and I spent the whole damned quarter mile chasing him down. At the finish line, he went 13.21 at 100, while I went 13.22 at 108.  Winner: Syclone.  Close, but no cigar for the Vette.

Moral: Don't get crazy about *any* time to speed.  It's time to distance that counts.

PS - To estimate changes in quarter mile times and speeds due to weight changes (or power gains), use the cube root of the change in power-to-weight ratio.  As an example, a 10% gain in power (or reduction in weight) should yield a 3.2% change in the numbers, so a 16.0 @ 85 car might turn into a 15.50 @ 87.7 car with 10% more power or 10% less weight."

- Bruce

4.1.2    A discussion of engine power, and the theory behind shifting.

Greetings to all who love torque and horsepower,

First, a clarification: torque is no more real than power.  The DOHC puts out 133 ft-lb of ground-pounding torque, but I've seen some older Neons that are leaking torque and you have to avoid driving behind them because the torque, once leaked, is slippery.  Don't bother picking it up and adding it to your engine as it degrades quickly and will take you out of Stock class.  Consider torque and power as concepts used to describe how things interact to produce movement and how "energy" (another concept) is transferred.

Both torque and power can be observed "directly".  Think of slowing a free-spinning tire with your hand.  Feel the tug on your palm and the tension in your arm?  That's a measure of torque, the torque the tire experiences as a result of your palm slowing it down.  Feel the heat build up from friction?  That's a measure of power.

Incidentally, water brake dynamometers get a direct measurement of power by measuring the increase in the temperature of water flowing past a propeller spun by the engine under test.  You can solve for torque if you know engine RPM.

 MAXIMUM ACCELERATION vs.  TORQUE:

I'd *like* to think that torque is an intuitively easier concept to understand.  If that were true, though, then more people would understand the relationship between torque, horsepower, and vehicle acceleration.  In reality, none of it is intuitive.  If it were, Newton wouldn't be considered the Really Great Guy that he is.

The classic mistake is to conclude that the fastest way down, let's say, a 1/4 mile drag strip is to keep the engine RPM at the torque peak (or as close as possible).  The technique is usually stated as "shift just after the torque peak", or "shift N RPM above the torque peak so you are N RPM below the torque peak in the next gear when you finish the shift".

Unfortunately, *engine* torque does not tell you the full story.  What matters is the torque *delivered to the tires*, including the effects of the transmission.  We all know a car does not accelerate as hard in second gear at peak torque RPM as it does in first gear.  The transmission amplifies or multiplies the torque coming from the engine by a factor equal to the gear ratio.  So to determine how much the car is accelerating at a particular instant, you have to know both the torque output of the engine as well as the gear ratio.

To figure out your shift points knowing only torque, generate tables of transmission output torque vs. RPM for each gear.  To get transmission output torque, multiply the engine torque by the gear ratio.  You are simply comparing gear to gear, so the final drive ratio can be ignored.  You may also need to know the relationship between RPM in one gear and RPM in another gear (which is RPM * (gear2ratio / gear1ratio) at any particular vehicle speed.)  Then it's easy to see what shift points to choose to maximize your transmission output torque at all times.

Here's an example for the DOHC motor w/ std.  5spd.  Before you flame, understand that I do not have an accurate torque curve for this motor.  I'm estimating visually from the curve printed in the '99 brochure, which is seriously flawed (it makes a lot more sense if the torque curve is shifted to the right 1000 RPM).  I get:

Engine		Transmission output torque (ft-lb)
RPM	Torque (ft-lb)	1st 3.54 gear ratio	2nd 2.13 gear ratio	3rd 1.36 gear ratio	4th 1.03 gear ratio	5th 0.72 gear ratio
1000	50	177	107	68	52	36
1500	65	230	138	88	67	47
2000	80	283	170	109	82	58
2500	92	326	196	125	95	66
3000	104	368	222	141	107	75
3500	114	404	243	155	117	82
4000	120	425	256	163	124	86
4500	125	443	266	170	129	90
5000	130	460	277	177	134	94
5500	133	471	283	181	137	96
6000	130	460	277	177	134	94
6500	122	432	260	166	126	88
7000	110	389	234	150	113	79

(note: peak torque is at 5500 RPM, peak horsepower is at 6500 RPM)

Without graphing, there's something immediately apparent: in any gear, at 7000 RPM, the transmission torque output is always higher than at any RPM in the next gear up.  What this means is, for this car:

Shift at the redline, not at the torque peak!

Walk through an example.  You're hammering down the track in 1st gear.  Engine RPM is 6000, just past the engine's torque peak.  Do you shift?  Well, if you do, the engine will be pulled down to 3600 RPM, and 2nd gear will send 246 ft-lb of torque to the wheels (actually, to the differential first, which amplifies the torque by a constant factor and sends it to the wheels).  Don't you think it would be better to hold it in first gear?  Torque is dropping off, but it's still 389 ft-lb at 7000 RPM, right before the 7200 RPM redline.  So, for this powertrain, first gear is *always* the best deal for acceleration, at any speed, except that you can't accelerate past the redline.

The 1-2 shift at 7200 RPM pulls the engine down to 4400 RPM, where 2nd will deliver 265 ft-lb of torque.  Not only did you win by maintaining the high torque of 1st all the way to 7200 RPM, you are now better off in second gear.

Same thing goes for the 2-3 shift.  2nd gear output torque at the redline is still greater than 3rd gear output torque at any engine speed, so you wind her out as far as she'll go before you shift to 3rd.  Same for the 3-4, same for the 4-5.

But, you ask, isn't your acceleration greatest at the torque peak?  Yes, it is!  BUT ONLY WITHIN THAT GEAR.  The next gear down will give you even greater acceleration at the same speed, unless the vehicle speed is too high for that gear.

To use engine torque to understand how your car performs, you MUST include the effects of the transmission.

 MAXIMUM ACCELERATION vs.  POWER:

OK, so what about power?  As has been noted by a previous contributor, Power (hp) = Torque (ft-lb) * RPM / 5252.  Note that power is also force * velocity, specifically:

   Power (hp) = Force (lb) * Velocity (MPH) / 374

That's net horsepower, which is engine power minus losses like transmission and tire friction.  The force is the sum of the longitudinal forces at the contact patches of the two driven tires.

Hmmm...  P = F * V  ...rearrange to get F = P / V  ...  that means that you get the maximum force pushing the car if you maximize your *Power* at any given velocity.  This gives us another useful rule:

    Shift to maximize engine POWER, not engine torque!

This is *exactly* the same as saying "shift to maximize transmission output torque".  But it's a little easier to apply.  Here's how.

Using the torque information above, I get the following power curve:

 RPM     HP
1000    10
1500    19
2000    30
2500    44
3000    59
3500    76
4000    91
4500   107
5000   124
5500   139  (peak torque)
6000   149
6500   151  (peak power)
7000   147

The tires don't see quite these numbers due to losses, but I'm going to assume that the losses are comparable from gear to gear and that the overall shape of the power curve remains the same.

Applying the maximum power rule, we'd like to race down the 1/4 mile with the engine always as close to 6500 RPM as possible.  If we had a continuously variable transmission, the lowest E.T.  would be achieved by keeping the engine dead on 6500 RPM.  5500 is not the best; at any vehicle speed, the engine would put out more torque but the transmission will have a less advantageous gear ratio, so you get a net loss of force to the tires.  Apply P = F * V or P = T * RPM to prove this.

Since the Neon doesn't have a CVT, we have to shift.  The shift points are pretty easy to determine.  In fact, you don't really need to know anything about the gear ratios of the different gears, which is why power is sometimes easier to understand than torque.

I'm going to assume that the DOHC puts out at least 145 horsepower at the redline (7200 RPM).  Shifting at the redline in each gear should drag the engine down as follows:

shift    RPM drop       Horsepower change
------   ---------------    ------------------
1->2   7200->4700    145->114
2->3   7200->4600    145->110
3->4   7200->5500    145->139
4->5   7200->5000    145->124

(I derived this, but all you really need to do is drive the car, shift, and find out where the motor lands)

Note - and this is important - the transmission does not amplify power.  Power in = power out, minus losses (which are low for a manual transmission).  This is predicted by the law of conservation of energy.

Is 7200 the correct shift point?  It would *not* be the correct shift point if the engine was making more power in the new gear than the old gear.  That would mean that you should have shifted earlier.  But in this case, the power output at redline is always greater than the power output after the shift.  So it's the best performance you can get.

A more rigorous way of doing this is to graph horsepower vs. velocity in each of the gears.  If power in one gear drops below the horsepower of the next gear at a particular MPH, then that MPH is where you should shift, otherwise shift at the redline.

I leave as an exercise for the reader the following:  predicting shift points based on engine torque, RPM, and gear ratio gives the same results as predicting shift points based on power and vehicle velocity.

 EXCEPTIONS:

There are no exceptions; a car running at its (net) power peak can accelerate no harder at that same vehicle speed.  There is no better gear to choose, even if another gear would place the engine closer to its torque peak.  You'll find that a car running at peak power at a given vehicle speed is delivering the maximum possible torque to the tires (although the engine may not be spinning at its torque peak).  This derives immediately from first principles in physics.

However, note the following:
 -- Transmission losses are not shown on engine power curves.  The net power curve (power delivered to the ground) may have a different shape or even a different peak RPM as a result.  This would result in different shift point.  Best results are obtained from a power curve measured by a chassis dynamometer.
 -- The discussion above assumes negligible tire slip.  If you exceed the maximum traction available from the tires, then additional power doesn't help.  That's why it's sometimes no loss at all to shift early when the tires break loose, and in fact it can be a benefit.

 TO THE POINT!

Torque and power are (almost) flip sides of the same coin.  Increasing the torque of an engine at a particular RPM is the same as increasing the power output at the same RPM.  Power is just as useful and relevant in determining vehicle performance as is torque.  In some situations it's more useful, because you may not have to play with gear ratios and a calculator to understand what's going on.

A car accelerates hardest with gearing selected to stay as close as possible to the engine *power* peak, subject to the traction capability of the tires.  Not all cars should be shifted at the redline for maximum performance.  But it's true for many cars.  You can determine optimal shift points by graphing horsepower vs. velocity or transmission torque vs. RPM.  Engine torque alone will not determine shift points."

 - Ed Lansinger
(Design Engineer, Ford Motor Company, Visteon Automotive Systems)
(former Design Engineer at GM Powertrain; inventor of Cadillac's Performance Algorithm Shifting feature)

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