Dear All,
Around about Christmas there was a request for a way of estimating your
horsepower from the top speed or other measurable. I have been playing about
with a load of road test reports and fitting the data into a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. For those of you who have a copy of Excel, it allows you to
input various details of your car (any car), estimated HP curve, weight,
axle ratio etc and will give you a calculated acceleration curve against
time.
It will also give estimated friction and air resistance figures from
"Coasting deceleration" figures and give estimated HP required for any road
speed. Figures seem to agree quite well with practice and it is interesting
to see how gearing and tyre size effect top speed and acceleration. I have
used default values for my GT6 but it would be easy to enter values for any
car. If anybody else would like a copy send me a message off-list and I will
send it in a couple of days time to everyone responding (about 140K long) I
don't claim anything specific about accuracy etc, it is just for fun. I will
send brief instructions in an E-mail along with the attachment. Any
feed-back is welcome, it is too cold to do any thing but "Virtual" work on
my car!
Peter French,
Bedfordshire, UK
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