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Originally Posted by cfos
Couple of question regarding specs (not trying to thread-jack and somewhat relevant to the original post):
I'm curious as to whether people actually achieve the "reported" times reported in the specs. Likewise, how many cars are tested before coming to the conclusion of, lets say 4.8 seconds? Are these factory-trained "professional" drivers that run 10 or so times and they take an average?
I also thought I read a thread or a post on this forum stating that cars of the same model and year may have different acceleration, hp? etc., from like models of the same build year. Granted, I'm not basing this on anything scientific as I was just thinking about this, but I would venture that a given driver would likely achieve different times per car and (perhaps?) per stats reported from the car company -- anyone ever try to match the acceleration times or have experience with other models?
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Well, to a real racer, the more relevant observation is that at no time in any motorsport do you accelerate from 0-60 and leave it at that.
Drag racing: Maybe an 1/8th mile in a slow car.
Autocrosing: nope
Time trials: nope
Wheel to wheel: nope
It's a pointless figure used by people to "compare" cars, but it's really not a fair comparison. The same is true for peak horsepower. Power is energy per unit time, it is a continuous time calculation of energy produced divided by revolutions of the engine. But area under the curve (total energy) is far more relevant. Furthermore, torque has as much to do with gearing as it does with torque curves. In first gear, your car puts down more than 1000ft lbs of torque!
I'm a professional analyst, so I always get bent around the axle on specs, because invariably specs are point estimates: single data points or statistics that are supposed to accurately describe a system. The problem is that the system cannot be reduced to a point and then compared to another system.
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