Jake - Thank you for finding the Paul Yaw dissertation. He has basically written the rant on this topic that I had threatened to write and post here. He even included the F1 engine versus diesel truck engine comparison I was going to use. For those of you who haven't read the link on Jake's post, answer this question. If you put into the same 2500 lb car, an F1 engine with 800 HP and 281 lb ft of torque, or a diesel with 305 HP and 550 lbft of torque, which one would accelerate faster? Then check out the answer - it's near the bottom of that article. If you guessed wrong, you need to read the whole article, and even if you were right, you might learn something.

One point for the folks who say that torque is what accelerates the vehicle. Yes, that's right. But at any given car speed, it's torque at the drive wheels, not torque at the crank. And the high HP, low torque engine (i.e., the one with higher revs) can multiply crank torque a lot more (through shorter final drive, gears and/or tires) than the lower HP, high torque engine.

Phil - do you have some dyno charts to demonstrate your argument that high torque/low rpm engines respond less to IT tuning? Because if you do, that would say that we need to give high torque engines a weight decrease! Definitely not conventional wisdom.