Gear ratio vs powerband 1

[Viper488]

All Dodge Vipers come with a 3.07 rear axle. Few if any owners who've gone to 3.45,3.55, even 3.73 gears can positively say they've seen an improvement in ET at the strip.
Yet the SOTP feel is tremendous(!), on the street anyway.

How can such a marked increase in SOTP fail to yield concrete ET gains ?

Obviously there's a point of diminishing returns when gearing up for the track, but near stock Vipers are not running out of RPMs before the end of the 1/4, nor running up into an upper rpm range well beyond the powerband .

I've noticed this on 4 stroke dirt bikes too. Is there something about torquey engines that have them just as happy leveraging themselves forward, rather than doing it through gear multiplication?

 

[nostrayvoltage]

Before I put 4.10 gears in my 1996 LT4 Corvette I plotted rear wheel torque vs mph for both the stock 3.45 and 4.10 gears based on actual dyno curve.

In essence the big gain in rear wheel torque occurs only in first gear up to the shift point(mph) with the 4.10 gears.

After this mph it flops back and forth as to whether you have more torque with the 4.10's or the 3.45's.

So to really benefit from the 4.10's you need to have traction in order to use increased torque.

Wish I could furnish before/after track data, but with street tires the after data was lots of tire spin at the track.


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