Great post, i've been really starting to grasp all of it lol.
One more question/comment about the converter, gears and tq in a street cars though.
So you mention that volumetric efficiency, how safe the motor is at high rpm's ect... are all limiting factors in how high you can have your TQ curve. Now ideally, you'd want that tq curve as high as possible, correct? So say you have that HUGE cam, a nice single plane manifold and good carb and you are making power from 4000rpm's all the way up to the moon with a solid cam. That would be ideal for the 1/4. BUT, You'd also need the appropriate converter and gears to make it all work, otherwise you'd be launching at 2200rpm's and not making any power. So now you need a very high converter to make the best of this power. That converter would probably be too much for the average (maybe daily driven) street car that sees racing use as well, but would be fine for a strictly race car.
Basically what I am trying to ask is wouldn't there be a limit to how high you'd want to make tq on a car that sees actual street use as well as race use simply because you just just wouldn't want to use a super high rpm converter on a street car? If you didn't use that high coverter, the car wouldn't move off the line until you started making power, which would come on high due to the tq curve being raised. I guess im just trying to point out a reason of why you need balance for cars that aren't strictly race cars.
Also, im thinking that you cant ignore low end power either, even if you do want to raise peak tq to as high as you can. I think this would be even more true on a heavy street car. Isn't this one of the reasons why people build stroker motors (aside from VE)? I have always thought that you WOULD want peak tq as high as possible, but you also wouldn't want to sacrifice the tq BELOW peak just to achieve that.
For example, lets say you have two motors, both with similar peak tq numbers. One makes power peak tq at 4000rpm's and the other at 5000rpms. The one that makes it at 5000rpm's barely has any tq on the curve before that, but the one that makes peak tq at 4000rpms has a relatively flat tq curve all the way to peak. In a light weight race car, that can use a super high converter-the motor that makes peak at 4000rpm's I would think is a better choice. But for a heavy car like my 4000pound 96 Impala, that motor would never have enough tq to get me off the line very well, I would guess that the first motor with peak tq at 4000rpm's but a flat tq curve before that would power a boat like the impala much better, all while allowing me to use a converter that would be appropriate for a street car.
Please correct me/school me if im wrong. Im just trying to learn all of this and figure out where the stuff I already know about heavy cars needing low end tq fits in.