Warning - this is a long post, and contains some provocative opinions - but it has helped me to procrastinate over starting the real work of today which is a boring user requirements review, so I make no apologies for hitting the 'Submit' button :-)
I reckon that for a car that is going to be used on the road, it is far too easy to spoil the car and the enjoyment of driving by having too much power - and 'too much' is really not very much at all, anything over about 200 - 300 bhp is too much, depending on the weight of the car.
Why? Well, think about when you are driving. You are either in traffic, in which case ultimate power is irrelevant, or you are out on the open road. On the open road you are probably on a motorway, in which case you can't sensibly drive at more than 100 mph for any length of time, for which a couple of hundred bhp is more than sufficient.
If you're not on the motorway, and you are away from towns and villages, and there aren't any speed cameras around, then it's definitely time to play - and this is where too much power spoils the fun completely. The enjoyment of driving is all about handling a car near the limit, and if you have too much power things can go horribly wrong very quickly indeed. So right at the time when you have the only chance in an otherwise pretty dull driving environment to really let rip and have a laugh, you can't because as others have pointed out, a moment's inattention with the right foot will have you backwards through the hedge faster than you can say "oh bollocks!"
"But what about torque?" I hear you cry. What about torque? I have a handy torque multiplier in my car, it instantly gives me as much torque as I need for any given situation. Choosing which setting to use is one of the core skills of driving, and it's something which I enjoy doing and getting exactly right whenever I can. Why on earth would I want to remove that element of driving enjoyment by slapping in an engine so powerful that its use becomes unnecessary?
There are 2 situations in which there is no such thing as too much power:
(a) for race cars - and anyone who has ever driven a pukka race car on the roads will know immediately that they are simply terrible for everyday driving
(b) for bragging rights down at the pub or on the internet - in which case it's vastly more economic to simply say that you've done the work, thus gaining the kudos but retaining the real fun of driving in the real world.
Of course, if you a a Driving God with superhuman skills, none of this applies. If you are rich as Croesus and can afford to have a car for every occasion this also doesn't apply, as one may as well have an largely unusable behemoth in the fleet, if for no other reason than it completes the set, as it were.
But for normal human beings, less is more. After all, if an Austin A35 on cross plies was James Hunt's vehicle of choose for driving on the road, who are we to argue?
