This is exactly what I'm saying.

I've done circle stuff that was 75 HP down on the dyno we were using. Yet the car was continually in the top 5, won a bunch and pulled most of the big HP cars 2 lengths out of the corner.

Had so many guys come in from a known local builder (he walks on water) and we would put the crap on the dyno and it would be down 50, 60 as much as 100 HP. So we would scale the car, do the math and then look at the time slips. Not one sigle time did our dyno numbers not match the ET and MPH close enough that we could definatively say either the other dyno was off, or someone lied.

Same thing with a different local guy, whose water brake dyno we would rent if we needed to. His numbers were spot on. We could go from the pump to the wheel dyno to the track and very seldom was I off more than a .1 when the car was sorted out. But that guy ate lots of crap for his engines being weak.

I was there when the same guy uncrated a Comp engine from California. We both looked at the dyno sheets and laughed. It was 90 HP more than the same basic combo the local guy was building. The California guy sold the local racer an expensive engine because he (the cali guy) told the local guy that he could set the National Record if he just dropped the coin for cali engine.

So onto the pump it went. It was 25 HP LESS than the local guys engine. Of course, the cali guy said the local dude was a liar and his stuff was the cats behind and he was an install and some tuning runs from a National Record. Into the car it goes and it runs it HP.

In fact, it actually made it's HP at a lower RPM and the torque curve
was rather strange (IIRC...I'm going back to about 1999 or 2000) so it was a bit slower than the local guys stuff.

Ironically, in doing the math, the local guys engine was running what all my math said it should for it's weight and HP.

The cali dude did not issue a refund when a National record was not set.