How does cid make power?

Rat Bastid said
It depends. And most of it depends on the engine builder. I guess there should be a qualification on what transmission is used.

If they are powerglide cars, then I’d want the power to hang on past peak longer. You want to stay above peak torque when your RPM fall back on the shift.

If it’s a 3 speed you can narrow up the power curve a bit but you lose power past peak. Once you go to 4 or better yet 5 gears, then you can narrow up the power curve even tighter. And that means you won’t have as much power past peak.

The latter two scenarios make the car harder to drive. You can’t short shift or the engine drops below peak torque and it’s a pig off the gear change.

Shift late and the power falls off so fast the car actually slows down before the shift. You can see this on a G meter if you data log.

When compairing two motors with simular shaped curves and one is higher at every rpm point it is easier to pick the winner with some certainty. When the shapes are different (flat vs peaky) or peaks occur at different levels (higher and lower) and or at different different rpm points (requiring different gear ratios) it all gets complicated. There are trade off points somewhere along the spectrum of each variable. Often it can be hard to judge where the trade off points are. Ultimately it will be a stopwatch or checkerd flag that decides at a race track. And on the street it's decided by a fun meter attached to the seat of your pants. This might explain why so many street motors appear to not be optimized for the race track, whatever type of race track that might be. For what its worth, I've looked and not been able to find a standarard for calibration of a fun meter.