I leave fwd's and rwd's from a roll, but then again, I'm light.

Funny that you mention logging Josh's car though. Because that is exactly the reason I was out at his place. We tuned out most of his knock until he was seeing 17-18 deg. of timing throughout. There is no doubt it was running strong. He's the more experienced driver too, though when racing in a straight line from a roll I don't think much driving skill is required. I went all the way to 110 mph still pulling on him. Now maybe if we had shifted to 5th and gone to 140 he would have started reeling me in. I have too often heard that all things being equal a FWD will pull on an AWD from a roll. Well in this instance all things were not equal. Josh's FWD had mods on me and I still pulled on him from a roll. Hence my reasoning that drivetrain loss becomes negligible once an AWD DSM starts getting modded more and more.

If you think about it, it makes sense. As you start modding a car you don't lose more horsepower due to drivetrain loss in proportion to the HP that you add. That would mean that though it took say 40 HP of drivetrain loss on a 200 HP AWD to get the tires moving on a stock car (assuming 20% drivetrain loss), it now takes 80 HP of drivetrain loss on a modded 400 HP AWD. I can't believe that drivetrain loss would increase linearly with HP. It doesn't make sense. I think the percentage of drivetrain loss decreases as you start modding a car. I think it remains a fixed number of 40 HP or maybe increases a little bit due to increased heat dissipation due to more power moving through the flywheel and drivetrain. So, accordingly, the 400 HP car would have say 10-11% drivetrain loss now.

Let's do the same thing with a FWD car assuming 10% drivetrain loss. 200 HP * 0.1 = 20 HP drivetrain loss. With my reasoning the 400 HP FWD should still be seeing only about 20 HP or slightly more of drivetrain loss at 400 HP. That translates to about 5-6% drivetrain loss. So now on two equally powerful modded AWD and FWD the drivetrain loss differs between the two by 5% rather than 10%. This difference will continue to shrink as both cars increase in HP.

how light?

God stuff, Nate. I guess that is very similar to what I was trying to say, but I lacked the motivation to elaborate as much. However, after the drivetrain loss becomes a relative non-issue, what becomes of the inherent weight disadvantage? It would seem that once a car reaches 400hp, 400lb would make less of a difference, but add 400lb to what is still roughly 5% less wheel hp, and logic says the fwd will still walk away. I believe this whole issue is very subjective, and that it stems from the fact that the two configurations feel completely different. It has always seemed to me that the fwd cars have more "legs," and that they accelerate harder in the top three gears.

Ironic that I was inadvertantly bringing your post back from the dead though too.

Note 2:  Josh's 16g never ran worth a sh!+.  His well prepaired 14b ran 13.4's  while his POS 16g with N2O could only muster a best of 13.8's.  So his particular 16g may not have been the best to compare to.

The FWD is just a great stock set-up which works well with an additional 100HP or so beyond that it's all up in tire smoke.

My vote is that the discrepancy fades way back as the cars double and triple in hp levels. But I'm hoping to find out at some point.