Peter Wheeler and Horsepower

[dhf]

I was looking at an old interview between Jeremy Clarkson and Peter Wheeler last night at the launch of the Cerbera and i quote (sorry Peter !)"there are alot of people who flash pretend horsepower numbers around.i can tell you when you have 360bhp in a car that weights just over a tonne,it becomes a very quick car".oops !(having no experience of Cerberas,he may be correct for the cerbera at least.)
the point i am trying to make is we all know that certainly the V8's don't make their quoted bhp,but how many other manufactures of the period were a little enthusiastic about their cars outputs ?

[HarryW]

But the 4.2 Cerbera's available at the time of the interview almost certainly were making at or near the claimed 360hp, it was only the later 420hp and 440hp 4.5's that where shy.

[dhf]

Hence my comment in brackets !

[spend]

Hmmm, I think its been shown that tweaking the air supply and using different ecu's can produce quite different figures. With the best intent in the world I'm not sure you could replicate the car config on an engine dyno. Conversely I'm not sure the public would be interested in a scientific dissertation of how the engines were rigged on the dyno Whatever methods / dynos used you have to have a fairly broad range of accuracy anyway I guess. Marketing and spinners as you would expect just use the most advantageous data available

It is no different to many posts on here IMHO. How often do you hear "I did this and got...", blindly glossing over that when they 'did this' they also happened to do this that & the other

[Chris71]

I'm told his philosophy was that the big manufacturers exagerated, so in order to compete you - how can I put this - needed to quote a good engine on a good day.

[dhf]

Chris71 said:

I'm told his philosophy was that the big manufacturers exagerated, so in order to compete you - how can I put this - needed to quote a good engine on a good day.

thats where i am coming from,take a comparable car(in horsepower only),say a porsche of similiar quoted bhp of 320bhp,is it really running at about 270bhp ?