Another 318 set up
both hp and torque are important and what you need will depend on the application.
Think of an electric motor, unlike a gas engine an electric motor can produce torque without rpms (movement). So if an electric motor is applying torque to your tires but producing zero movement (rpms) then zero work is being done and zero hp being made and all the energy being made into heat.
It's not until the engine starts to turn, some revolutions (rpm), movement has begun, that work is now being accomplished by power watts/hp etc.., torque alone does not do anything (see above paragraph), it takes torque and rpms to accomplish the task (work) and it's this combination of torque and rpm allows us to accomplish our goals and we call this combination HP and it takes a certain amount of hp to accomplish these task.
So torque by itself can't do anything and the amount of torque to do the task with rpm can vary widely, so it not that torque isn't important, it does play an important role, it's just by itself can't do anything and the amount of it is somewhat meaningless cause you could have a 500 lbs-ft engine make a 150 hp and a 150 lbs-ft engine make 500 hp.
So bottom line hp is what you need and it's made up of some ratio of torque and rpm. There should be no hp vs torque and or hp does this and torque does that. If there any vs should be torque vs rpm do you want to build X amount of HP with higher or lower rpm with less or more torque, basically displacement vs rpm.
I think people tend to equate RPM and HP as same/similar and that above 5252 rpms is HP at work and below 5252 rpms is torque at work. Instead of it being two graphs overlaid on top of one another one is data collected (torque at rpms) and other being the engines ability (hp over rpms).
