Class A Ford V10 performance

Bruce Brown wrote:

irishtom29 wrote:
A 24,000 pound, 320 HP Ford V-10 gasser has a better power to weight ratio than any DP at GVWR I'm aware of; I did the ciphering on quite a few. The gasser power comes at a higher RPM so needs to rev higher than a diesel. But the Ford V-10 runs high revs reliably.

First let me say I'm a big fan of the V10, but...

In MH duty torque is far more important than HP. The 460# of torque the V10 has just doesn't compete with the 1000# + (ours is 1200#) of a big diesel.

With that said, in gasser duty the V10 has a great reputation and by most accounts the current version is the best - and oddly on paper it has less HP and more torque than the previous versions. :w

I understand that the new version mainly has less horsepower because it's rated at a lower RPM, I think due to some emissions requirements (though I don't recall whether it's noise emissions or combustion byproduct emissions). The power curve is pretty much the same as for previous versions, and the internals are not changed at all though the ECU programming may well be tweaked.

Torque in and of itself from the engine is pretty nearly meaningless to vehicle performance. An engine producing 400 ft-lbs of torque at 4000 rpm (roughly 300 hp) can be substituted directly for one producing 1000 ft-lbs of torque at 1600 rpm (also roughly 300 hp) by introducing a 2.5:1 reduction drive.