You know have waaay too much power when. . . . .

What's funny is that I was thinking of this thread while getting onto a highway in my X5 4.6is... I gave it like half throttle when getting onto the highway and I ended up merging into a 65mph highway at like 90mph, whoops. Had to hit the brakes a bit.

It's a little surreal how a 4800lb SUV can accelerate so well. I guess it's a combination of having 340hp/350tq + a high stall torque converter + 3.91 rear gears + AWD + a super aggressive factory tune.

I can't imagine how a Cayenne Turbo S feels... the X5 4.6is is about the fastest I'd ever want an SUV to be, speed is kinda sketchy in something so bulky.

Right about now....

rslifkin wrote: In reply to ProDarwin: Keeping up with traffic is easy enough. However, things like merging directly from an on ramp to the middle lane and getting up to the 70 mph flow of traffic to get around the idiot merging into the right lane at 40 mph (and cutting people off in the process) in front of you requires some power unless the road is very empty. On the street with other cars around, having more power gives more options.

Eh. To each his own. There is obviously a lower limit. Car merging at 40mph? Hang back and give yourself some room.

914Driver wrote: Right about now....

thats not too much horsepower, thats not enough driveshaft

When the "thrill giggles" turn into "fear poops"

gearheadmb wrote: When the "thrill giggles" turn into "fear poops"

code brown!

Your tire bill is only exceeded by your speeding fine expenses.

when ya feel Kinda Scared to get in!

but really It's Like Having Kinky Sex..... It's Only Kinky the First Time.

GTXVette wrote: when ya feel Kinda Scared to get in! but really It's Like Having Kinky Sex..... It's Only Kinky the First Time.

Also, like power, kinky starts small. One day a feather is fun, eventually the whole chicken is needed for a feeling of "normal".

Umm.....or so I've heard.

I like having a car with enough torque at highway speeds I only need to think about changing speeds ad the car does it. The best drive I've had was traveling out to Salt Lake in my '96 Formula w/LT1. Drive along 85-90, need to slow down or speed up just twitch my toe a little and it would respond. My wife RAV4 its press the pedal down half way and it thinks about speeding up. Real drag driving that.

"I will have enough power when I can spin the tires at the end of the longest straight in top gear" - Mark Donohue

For the street, I will have enough power when the police need to call the Air National Guard to rent an F-16 to keep up.

ProDarwin wrote: I'm curious where you guys drive that navigating traffic requires *any* appreciable amount of horsepower. I DD an *automatic* Saturn with heavy as 17" wheels that came off our rallyx car. We're talking 17 second 1/4 mile. Then I turn the A/C on. I can't ever recall being in traffic where the power of the car was a limiting factor. No normal driver in traffic is using more than like 40hp, so its pretty easy to keep up with all of them. That said, doubling the power would sure make it a lot more fun :)

L.A. Same story as Phoenix.

I think most of us just adapt our driving style to the car we drive the most. My dd used to be 3200lb and had 200hp which I thought was plenty until i got my MS3 which weighs the same and has 260hp. Suddenly new passing options open up and if I can see the light turn yellow I can make it. But now I'm finding the gaps I can't make and I wish I had a little more power... on and on we go.

That said I don't REALLY want more power. Felony speeds are already too easy... 200hp is the sweet spot where I'm comfortable hammering through traffic and from light to light and it's not attracting too much attention.

jharry3 wrote: Your tire bill is only exceeded by your speeding fine expenses.

I'm getting close! In the past year and a half I've accrued about $600 in speed tickets. Thanks to a combination of online driving schools, getting tickets in different states, and straight up not paying some of those tickets (camera tickets are easy to ignore in Phoenix) I still have my license, cheap-ish insurance, and a seemingly clean driving record. That's about as much as I've spent to put new Continental Extremecontact DW's on my 540i wagon (which earned the majority of those tickets).

In reply to dannyzabolotny:

Don't expect that to last long. Johnny law will put you on his list of people to visit.

Funny, I don't need a lot of power to get stopped for speeding. My Fiesta does that easily. So speed is not the need for more power, it's how quick you get there.

What is this fascination with breaking tires loose?

Tires spinning are tires not doing their job. Unless you are drifting in a corner, if your tires break loose under acceleration or braking, you either have crap tires or aren't driving to best advantage.

I had a friend with a late 1950s C1 Corvette with a raging SBC (which in those days in stock form was about 250 old style gross horsepower) He was impressed that it would break the tires loose all the way through 3rd gear if he floored it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't the power (what there was of it) it was the crap hardened tires that cornered like skating on ice they were so not sticky.

My old turbo Fiero was probably the greatest accelerating car from a stop I ever owned. With sticky tires and a rear weight bias, it was very hard to squeal the rubber no matter how hard you tried - the car just....went, usually leaving the 'squealers' behind.

FWIW, around 10:1 ratio of weight to power starts to get exciting.

wspohn wrote: What is this fascination with breaking tires loose?

It's fun?

I've owned nothing but "work" trucks. The only real source of giggles I can get out of them without getting shot for trespassing around here is occasionally mashing the gas and lighting the rears up.

The best at doing it was my 95 3/4 ton with a 360, and it had the biggest tires out of all of them.

Trackmouse wrote: In reply to dannyzabolotny: Don't expect that to last long. Johnny law will put you on his list of people to visit.

Well I paid all of the in-person tickets, since I can't really get out of them. However, the camera speeding tickets are rather easy to get out of thanks to the laws here in Phoenix. Getting the ticket in the mail doesn't mean anything, somebody has to serve it to you in person for it to be valid. If you never get served in person, the ticket gets dropped after 90 days. Occasionally somebody will attempt to serve you at your house, but as long as you don't open the door it doesn't count. The way I see it, if I can avoid paying $242 then that's more money for car parts. And if I end up paying the ticket it's not the end of the world either, but I like to try to get out of them first, because it's all just a shady money-making scheme for the city anyways.

wspohn wrote: ... What is this fascination with breaking tires loose?...

I like it when a competitor does it because it means I'm going to win.

wspohn wrote: What is this fascination with breaking tires loose? Tires spinning are tires not doing their job. Unless you are drifting in a corner, if your tires break loose under acceleration or braking, you either have crap tires or aren't driving to best advantage. I had a friend with a late 1950s C1 Corvette with a raging SBC (which in those days in stock form was about 250 old style gross horsepower) He was impressed that it would break the tires loose all the way through 3rd gear if he floored it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't the power (what there was of it) it was the crap hardened tires that cornered like skating on ice they were so not sticky. My old turbo Fiero was probably the greatest accelerating car from a stop I ever owned. With sticky tires and a rear weight bias, it was very hard to squeal the rubber no matter how hard you tried - the car just....went, usually leaving the 'squealers' behind. FWIW, around 10:1 ratio of weight to power starts to get exciting.

I dunno, you either like it or you don't. It's very much an American thing to love burnouts, it stems from a long tradition of drag racing where cars do burnouts prior to launching to warm up the tires and make them stickier.

I have good tires that grip well in 99% of driving conditions (fairly new Continental Extremecontact DW tires), but if I mash the brakes and gas at the same time I can still make some glorious tire smoke. There's just something really satisfying about hearing the roar of a V8 and seeing a cloud of white smoke in the back.

I guess I haven't been exposed enough. I plan on doing one burnout on the GTA's current tires that are old and dry rotted on the way to get sticky tires put on it that it probably won't be able to unstick without a lot of effort.

if I mash the brakes and gas at the same time I can still make some glorious tire smoke. There's just something really satisfying about hearing the roar of a V8 and seeing a cloud of white smoke in the back.

I guess that's the difference. I would far rather see the other car disappearing in my mirror than tear up my tires in a puerile show of burning rubber.

One of the funniest things I ever saw was when I pulled up behind a rumbling Corvette who was beside a young blonde girl at a stoplight. She was driving a Tesla Sport - one of the rare electric cars with a Lotus chassis. He-man in the Corvette lit his tires up and made lots of noise when the light changed and sat there spinning as the girl simply and silently blew him away - looked like she left him standing - the Tesla sport would do 0-60 in 3.7 secs. (I looked it up later) in absolute silence without even a tire squeal.

I gather from the responses in this thread that the majority here would rather have been the loud fellow in the Corvette that got left behind...?

wspohn wrote:

if I mash the brakes and gas at the same time I can still make some glorious tire smoke. There's just something really satisfying about hearing the roar of a V8 and seeing a cloud of white smoke in the back.

I guess that's the difference. I would far rather see the other car disappearing in my mirror than tear up my tires in a puerile show of burning rubber. One of the funniest things I ever saw was when I pulled up behind a rumbling Corvette who was beside a young blonde girl at a stoplight. She was driving a Tesla Sport - one of the rare electric cars with a Lotus chassis. He-man in the Corvette lit his tires up and made lots of noise when the light changed and sat there spinning as the girl simply and silently blew him away - looked like she left him standing - the Tesla sport would do 0-60 in 3.7 secs. (I looked it up later) in absolute silence without even a tire squeal. I gather from the responses in this thread that the majority here would rather have been the loud fellow in the Corvette that got left behind...?

Doing a burnout in a Corvette is far more satisfying than zipping ahead quietly in a Tesla. Life's not always a race, sometimes it's fun to just burn up some tires, even if it means "losing." Save the actual racing for the track.

All you need is lots of gear. My '50 Desoto would easily do it if in low gear/range. On nice thing about those old hard bias ply tire, a few burnouts didn't seem to faze them.

I like having enough power to spin tires, but I hate burnouts. Im starting to have the opinion burnouts (outside of a drag strip warmup) are kinda the performance car equivalent of rolling coal. Loud, obnoxious, smoky, bad for the environment, and generally unpleasant for everyone other than the driver and maybe a few onlookers encouraging him/her.