Hmm... Cart question.

[SpaceCowboy]

Hey all. First time poster, long time AMG fan.

I've been slowly been keeping up to date on AMG manga, but before reading about the K1-Sora race, I wasn't much of a gearhead.

Rereading a scanslation for chapter 19, I noticed that the carts that they were using, according to Chihiro's advertisement were, 35hp from a 40cc engine. Now, i'm not sure if anyone else caught on, but isn't 35 hp a bit much from a 40cc engine? Maybe its a scanslation mistake, but i'm guessing it should be 3.5 horsepower instead. (If you know of a way to push 35 ps from 40cc's w/o forced induction, TELL ME!)

Oh yeah, i'm slowly buying the manga, so don't worry.

And those carts rock. I'm thinking about building one.

[Timotheus]

Since no one else has had a go at this, I guess it's up to me.

You're correct in that its probably a mistake, but it seems to go back to the original manga. So don't blame the translators. I've checked a couple of translation sites and they both have 35 ps for the number as well.
What's neat is I found a website with advertisements for that style of mini-go-cart, or PaveRacer as they call them. While the carts illustrated aren't exactly the same as the ones used by Sora and Keiichi, there's a lot of points of similarity, so I'd guess that the drawings are based on a real PaveRacer design, perhaps the ones available in 1998 when the story was being written.

Link to advertisement for Tanaka PaveRacers 40cc PowerKarts...

www.jacmacscooters.com/40cc_paveracer_powerkarts.htm

These carts are also rated at 35 mph (50 kph), same as the ones in the story.

And while 35 ps for a 40 cc engine may be a little high, it looks like 3.5 would be reasonable for a high performance 40cc.

Advertisement spec. from the paveracer website....

"TC-47R Tanaka High Performance Engines: Larger Adjustable Venturi Carburetor, Increased Compression, Velocity Stack, Air Filter. 3.0 Horse power (Stock 47cc is 2.2 horsepower) Complete with gas tank "

Interestingly enough (for those who didn't already know this), the unit "ps" is not the same as "hp" (horse power) or "bhp" (braking horse power). It comes from the German words for "horse power" (pferde starke), but should probably be more closely translated as "continental horsepower".



This measure was chosen in Europe as being the closest thing to a horsepower that could be expressed in nice round metric units - 75 kilogram meters/second to be exact. While originally used in metric countries (like Japan), nowadays it seems to be commonly used by most car and engine manufacturers, often synonymously with bhp although it is actually a slightly smaller unit of power.

One ps is about 98.6% of one bhp.