Originally Posted By: hattaresguy
You can't run a motor at WOT for long enough on the street.
FYI on off road applications like boats or in equipment WOT is measured as a percentage for each hour of operation. Like say 10 or 20 minutes of WOT operation per hour.
You can't do that on a street car let alone a track car. WOT for 10-30 seconds is enough to get into illegal speeds and won't even get any heat into a performance car like a Porsche or Ferrari, or a Cummins.
I'll take something like say the Yanmar's in the cruising sailboat and run them for 2-3 days straight at 3.5k RPM, and they won't complain.
Car engines are simply not pushed.
Absolutely, 100%. Really stop to think about it, on public roads even in a "slow" car 15 seconds at WOT is going to put you at or above any legal speed limit in this country. Fact is, engines just aren't run WOT for very long at a clip. Even if you find a nice stretch of empty highway and decide to open it up, so you top it off after a min or two and then what? Run into the next county/state at that speed? No. Same for the autobahn example above, assuming you could even do that, run for a couple hours at WOT and you're out of Germany.