True but the automatic still has to turn a pump. The figures I read were also dyno results and some claim the C6 can rob as much as 60 hp but 50 was more of a general consensus in the articles I read.
so lets go with 60 hp on the dyno... that could be 60 horsepower at 6,000 rpm.
power loss to hydrodynamics is exponential so halve the 6k rpm and at 3,000 rpm the power loss is not going to be half of 60 or 30 hp loss.
The oil pump itself simply is not going to take 60 hp to drive, you could drive it with a 3 horse lawnmower engine.
it's is too small and doesn't flow near enough fluid to result in 60 horsepower parasitic.
As a rough estimate I'd say it flows less than a 3hp power washer.
The oil pump in the c6 is roughly the same size and flows the same oil volume as the front pump in a c4, a powerglide, a turbo 350, turbo 400, 4l60, 4l80, e40d aod...
it is close to the size and flow of a power steering pump.
also the torque converters are similarly matched to the engine size and vehicle weight regardless of if it's a gm ford or dodge.
Now if you hooked a tranny to a dyno and used the dyno as a motor to drive the tranny you could measure parasitic loss to friction.
But I suspect the dyno results your quoting are dynamic losses not parasitic.
if that's the case, if the dyno setup was such that an engine was ran against the dyno without a transmission for a baseline reading and then the tranny was added to measure by deduction the horsepower lost by the c6..
Then it would not be a measure of how much energy it wastes through friction but a combination of frictional losses and intertial losses
The bulk of your horsepower loss is due to the rotating parts inside the c6 being heavier than the parts in smaller trannies.
10% of engine rotation is lost motion through torque converter slippage.
some of the other power is lost through heat that occurs from friction of the hydrodynamic fluid flow within the torque converter as it approaches stall and multiplies torque.
The rest of your lost power is consumed when the dyno tries to accelerate the rotating mass..
Since the deceleration is not returned to the calculations the dyno operation only measures gross power required to accelerate the rotating mass from idle to redline
Power is a measure of force time distance or force times time.
Your consuming horsepower to spin up the guts of the tranny. on the street that energy would be returned when the whole thing coasts to a stop.
But on the dyno it gets chucked out of the equation because drag racing is about going the fastest from zero to win... the power measurements from zero to win and back to zero do not apply in drag racing.
The ramifications are that the 60 horsepower lost accelerating the c6 to 6,000 rpm are from:
Having to spin the engine at 6600rpm to get 6,000 rpm at the driveshaft>
the energy required to drive the engine an extra 600 rpm is also going to be part of that 60 horsepower
The frictional losses in the torque converter
The frictional losses in the rotating assembly (gears, clutches, bearings, oil pump)
The inertial "losses" from accelerating the mass then discarding the deceleration energy from the equation.
You still end up with a lost 60 hp but what I'm saying is it isn't leaving the party in the way you think it is. Some of that 60hp is real loss and some of it is an academic loss due to the way the power is measured and calculated. Dyno measurements are like trying t figure your mpg by only measuring how much power is consumed c
limbing hills.
