If the engines rev too high and we can adjust much more things than you can on a standard road car like spring rate, brake torque, differential etc, it seems strange that you cannot remove the passenger seat and add a rollcage. I'm pretty sure that the most important thing when it comes to preparing a car for the track is to fit a rollcage!
Your typical low-displacement hatchback has a very undersquare engine (very long stroke, small bore) which tends to result in very low revs. My sister's Honda CRX HF had the 1.5L engine and it reved the same as the Pontiac 3.8L pushrod V6 in my old car. This configuration tends to result in much longer engine life. Also, these types of engines tend to have extremely mild cams to widen the powerband and keep revs low.
However, it certainly isn't impossible to get some serious power out of a small engine without forced induction. Case in point, motorcycles. More specifically, since it has the same 1.3L displacement, the Suzuki Hayabusa. It produces about 170 HP at 10,000 RPM. It has an extremely oversquare engine (short stroke, large bore) and extremely aggressive cams.
The difference is, of course, that a motorcycle engine doesn't last nearly as long as a car engine. I'd be very surprised to see a motorcycle with 100,000 miles on it.
XF GTIs engine is small, hi-reving and nearly normal powered. I think that engine with that revs should have ~150bph. With 115bph this revs are nonsense. Also hi-reving engines like to be hi-reving, otherwise they're very weak. As I know little hipowered, hireving engines have a redline close after peak bph, to prevent reving it ahead and cause damage. XFG has max power at 7000rpm, redline at...9500rpm. Pretty long, but rev limiter is all 1k rpm later, at 10500rpm. What is that for for car with max torque at 5400rpm?
All cars in demo has that 'issue', and S2 maybe too, when I look at their tech specs.
Radian = more mathematically proper/less arbitrary way to state degrees
360 degrees = 2*(pi) radians because 2(pi) radians is the circumference of a circle with a radius of 1, or the unit circle.
Now the road cars are realy fine… and the GTR cars are boring… I honestly think that GTR and formula cars had already fine redlines… race prepared engines supposed to rev that high and have a bit more spare room for revving 1000rpm above the peak power…
eg now the XFR with a 2lt engine race engine has a rev limiter on 7900 something rpm.
FOX tops @ 7500 !!!
There are every day driven road cars that have higher rev limiters than that
Engine sounds needed to be more exiting and now they are less
I “hate” all of you suggesting that to Scawen…
well actually one of the first things you do when taking your car to the track regularly is take the rev limiter off, it's a pretty simple job, and almost everyone i race with has done it to their road/track car.
I have seen limiters in JGTC cars, almost any touring car series actually, club level racing cars and so on, only reason to remove rpm limiter would be that if engine would been modded and limiter cuts before maximum power, which is perhaps quite rare situation as typically modded car will have programmable ecu nowdays, which again has programmable rev limiter.
Removing rev limiter from completely stock car is mostly lack of knowledge, same way as people still are saying one should not polish intake manifold runners, that was with carbs, with FI it is better to polish them