Randy Pobst Explains the Difference Between Horsepower & Torque

When it comes to breaking down mechanical concepts like horsepower and torque, you could probably sit there and look at formulas and equations and technical specs until you’re blue in the face but unless you’re sitting there and engineering something, I don’t think that any of that would do you very much good. Instead, what could be even more useful to understanding concepts like these would be hearing actual stories and having a more simplified breakdown of when or where you feel that horsepower and torque hitting when you get in your car and stop on the accelerator.

In order to break it all down for us, the VINwiki car channel brings in famed racing driver and journalist, Randy Pobst. Pobst gives us a whole rundown of a collection of cars that he has driven and the slight nuances of each that really made them memorable vehicles to stick out of his mind, cars that might not have been the most powerful but certainly were doing something incredibly right. After having driven so many cars as a journalist and racecar driver, you know that if a car sticks out in Randy’s mind, it’s probably pretty special. There are just so many different ways to enjoy racing that really make it something that everybody can take in their own personalized way.

Follow along in the video down below as Pobst gives us some fun anecdotes from over the years of being behind the wheel of all sorts of cars and gives us a really down-to-earth explanation of how to decipher the difference between horsepower and torque. I think that, with an eplanation of the factors like this, just about anybody would be able to understand the concepts and how they’re working in real life when you stomp on that long, skinny pedal.