You will get a load of peopel saying "torque wins races" now i suspect, but thats not actually the case, its all down to horsepower really.

The thing that accelerates your car is torque at the wheels at the end of the day.

BHP = Torque * RPM / 5252
Torque @ Wheels = Torque @ flywheel / gearing
(subject to transmission losses of course, but those are fairly constant)



So you can see from that basic formula that 500bhp will results in the same torque at the wheels wether you hit 500bhp @ 5000rpm (525.2 lb ft of torque) or at 10,000rpm (262.6 lbft of torque) for the simple reason that the car with less torque and more RPM will have half the gearing at any given speed that the torquier motor will.


There are some other factors, like for example how often you have to change gear and stuff like that, but fundamentally the actuall acceleration at any given speed once you are in the correct gear will be basically the same for any two engines with the same bhp even if one has miles less torque.

The key thing though is that im only talking about at that point in the rev range, generally torquey motors have a flatter curve so the values either side of the peak value will be higher, and therefore quicker over a range of rpm.