one HUUUGE thing your forgetting about. when power/torque figures are quoted theyre exclusively peak power/torque.
power is produced at every point on the rpm range except for 0rpm.
and gearing...gearing.
True, but I think you'll find that in every post I've made on this forum, I've supported N/A cars purely for the fact that generally speaking, their power curve is far more predictable and far more linear than that of boosted cars (I say in general, I know it's possible to achieve a similar result using boost but it's far more expensive).

what your v8 and your mates differed was probably 1. launch traction, 2. torque/power curve, and 3. gearing
Same gearing, he had slightly better traction but not enough to make 4 seconds difference... It was the torque that made the difference.

it annoys me when people state that torque is more important then power, cause its not.
I don't think I ever said that one is more important than the other. In fact, I'm quite sure I never said it.

What I did say, was that people pay far too much attention to getting massive power output without considering their torque output. People keep talking about modding 1.6L engines and making them more powerful than 1.8L engines, and that may be so, but there is a reason the 1.8L is better, and that's torque. Assuming the peak power of the engine is the same, the engine with more torque wins, hands down.

Anyone who has ever raced on a track, or anywhere for that matter, knows that being able to drive at 400kph doesn't mean alot when you're facing corners. The car that launches faster and can handle corners faster, will always come out on top, and I've proven that in practice. My 600hp ute can quite comfortably sit on 330kph (I've done it before), but it gets eaten alive by anything with decent torque and the ability to handle corners.

a low torque high power engine will always out accelerate a high torque low power engine as long as you get the right gearing relevent to the engine. for example. 2 cars, same everything except engine (for the sake of argument same driver too) one engine is more powerfull, the other has slightly more torque (lets assume for the sake of argument that the curve in both engines is relatively flat and the engines have the same gearing) the engine with more torque will accelerate faster off the line, but very quickly will reach redline, where the engine with more power will accelerate through and pass the engine with more torque, as its essentially gear 1 vs 2, with the more powerfull engine always beign in a lower gear longer, and therefore resulting in more torque AT THE WHEELS, despite the actual engine having less torque at the flywheel.
Lower torque at the engine, higher torque at the wheels... I'm confused. Torque is not produced at the wheels, it's the ability of the engine to make the wheels turn under load. More torque means faster acceleration, because the engine can make the wheels turn more easily under load. It doesn't matter if you have a million horsepower, if your torque is low, you will never be able to make the mass of the car move forward.

That's why high powered 4 cylinder cars lose alot of their driving potential when they have 4 people sitting in them, whereas an 8 cylinder engine with much more torque can move that extra mass with relative ease.

Having said that, I repeat, I never said that power is unimportant, it's just not as important as people think. In real-life driving, meaning driving on roads with corners and the need to stop and start from time to time, torque becomes a major factor in performance. If you were doing laps around a ring, then it becomes less important and peak power comes into play, since you're moving around in top gear for long periods of time. Lets assume, for the sake of being realistic, that this doesn't happen often...

As you say, gearing is important, but again, we're not talking so much about gearing as we are about engines. The question was, why use a B18 when a B16 can produce as much, if not more horsepower. The answer is torque. If you modify a B16 and a B18 so that both produce 200hp at the engine, the B18 will always win, always, because it has more torque.

where this dosent happen (like in that v8 scenario) you have a bad power curve brought on by (im assuming) bad supercharger design/large turbo introducing lots of lag. (i assime you used a charger to make that much power) or other things.
No, purely N/A, with shortened gear ratios. I spent alot of money making my car very powerful, before I fully realised what I was doing.

Anyway, even a large turbo on a 5.7L V8 has very little lag, as the exhaust output is massive even at idle. I was quoted for a T1000 turbo with an expected power output of 1700rwhp, 80% boost at 1800rpm. No lag there.

this is why all those >1000hp supras cant even run 11's, despite the supra being a barge, the power is totally useless because it dosent come on untill the last 1-500 of your rpm range.
another example of this is a roots blown pushrod v8 vs a 1000hp supra. the roots blown v8 has lots of usable torque as its POWER is produced throughout the ideal rev range for the v8 compared to the 1000hp supra which produces no power untill the last .5k of the rev range, so effectively, the v8 is running at a HIGHER POWER the majority of the time, with the supra only overtaking the v8 in terms of power production for a fraction of a second before each gear change
Which is why I always advise against sticking a turbo on a Civic. The power band is too narrow, and the power curve is too sharp, and it makes for a really difficult time driving on anything but a straight road.

thing is power isnt some abscract figure, physics/engineering guys will agree power is a measure of the energy transferred every second. 1kw is 1000 joules of energy transferred every second. torque is just rotational force, and its very easy for the engine to produce alot of torque and not actually get anywhere fast. eg high torque low power can get to a speed quickly, but that speed is greatly limited by the power of your engine, and its possible to have an engine with lower torque but higher power accelerating much quicker because of gearing. people forget that quoted torque figures are at the fly, not at the wheels.
True, a car with a million Nm of torque and no power will not move very fast at all, but now you're talking extremes. A car with a million horsepower and no torque will not be able to move off the line to begin with, even if it could travel at the speed of light once it got moving.

thats the thing. torque is just there, whereas power can take advantage of gearing.
True, torque is torque and it's hard to increase the torque output of an engine without increasing its capacity, which is why the B18 is superior to the B16, again.

The B18 can produce just as much power as the B16, but on top of that, it produces more torque, which will result in quicker acceleration throughout the entire rev range.

another example b16b produces 160Nm of torque whereas the d16y4 produces 144Nm of torque. given this difference, if you were only looking at torque you would only excpect the b16b to be a small ammount quicker, cause theres only a 14Nm difference in the torque, thats only 8% 'slower'.
but obviously the b16b is MUCH quicker then this. and that can be seen when you compare the b16b's 136kw to the d16y4's 88kw, which is a whole 35% less power, which sounds more reasonable. this is coupled with the gear box aswell which is suited to the b16b to take advantage of this extra power.
infact, the b16a1 has the same quoted torque figure as the d16y4, but its much faster. if torque was much more important then power you'd see the b16a1 only narrowly beating a d16y4, but obviously that is absurd.
Again, I NEVER said that power was unimportant. Please read my post very carefully, because I'm SURE that I never said it.

if your low power high torque car can accelerate faster then your low torque high power car, you have a serious problem either in your power curve, or your gearing
...or torque plays a bigger role than you seem to believe.

im not saying torque is not important at all, cause it clearly is and you have to carefully look at where the torque is produced in the rpm range based on application and where you are going to use it. i have just assumed a straight drag scenario. but power IS more important then torque.
I never assume straight drag scenarios, because drag cars are absolutely useless everywhere else. Plus, Civics are a really bad choice for drag cars since they are both underpowered and front wheel drive. In a drag, you want big power, big torque and the wheels being driven by the engine to actually be touching the ground when you accelerate... Rear wheel drive cars press their drive wheels into the ground under acceleration which is why they will always be superior to front wheel drive cars in drags.

Not only that, but drags really don't interest me. To me, driving skill is all about balance. Acceleration, braking and cornering. Drag racers only have to master one, track and mountain racers have to master all three.

also, if torque won races, you'd see alot more diesels in motorsport
There are some diesels in motorsport, but diesel engines are not as widely used by the general populace at the moment, and the engines themselves are not as highly developed. I think, given time, you will see more diesel engines hit the tracks. It's just going to take time before people start looking for ways to utilise the torque they can produce without sacrificing too much power.

I apologise for any harshness in my tone, I just got home from a 16 hour day at work and I'm a bit tired. I'm really just over this misconception that big power figures are the be-all and end-all of performance. Balance is where it's at, and a balanced car will ALWAYS beat an unbalanced, high-powered car in any situation except for a long, long straight.