Just coming into this, I have a question for you davidmc. This isn't rhetorical, I'm interested.
So, max acceleration in any gear is at max torque, accepted. On a direct drive kart, we can't change gear whilst accelerating, true. However, we CAN change the gearing the kart is running at….
So, max acceleration is provided by max torque (and here's the important bit) AT THE WHEELS, and torque is multiplied through the gearing…
So, if I've understood this correctly…. The fastest engine will be the one with the highest power… but we should then theoretically choose a gearing which gives us the greatest area under a graph of torque during a lap (only the bits where you're accelerating obviously)…. Since we can't actually measure the continuous torque during a lap, we approximate this by maximising the area under the torque curve for the rev range used during a lap….
I'm sure I'm wrong about at least something… so please do correct me
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