I agree PMB, when you only need it to have serious torque when it's at high speed, there are many useful things to do that may not have any important disadvantages. You sometmes do need to watch the detail, though - I can remember a carburetor with a protruding lump built onto its interior because it caused a turbulent wake area over one of the discharge orifices just at one speed, and that cured a troublesome flat spot at one fairly low engine speed.
Some racing classes do not allow gearboxes or clutches, so the engines may need some torque at a fairly low speed to be able to get around the corners and still accelerate out of them. I can even remember in the early 1950s a British firm called BRM made a really clever formula one engine that turned out to be useless. The formula at the time allowed 1.5 litres supercharged or 3 litres naturally aspirated, and BRM calculated that they could get much, much more power from a very highly blown 1.5 litre than from any 3 litre that was feasible at the time. In practice they got 535 hp, and no one could get much more than 300 from the 3 litre naturally aspirated at the time, so it looked very clever. The downside was that to get the 535 hp they had to use a three stage centrifugal supercharger. The pressure developed by centrifugal superchargers is approximately proportional to the cube of the speed (volume is proportional to the square of the speed), so the engine had a power curve shaped like the top of the Matterhorn. The best available drivers would go around the first half of a corner bogged down, then the engine speed would climb just 100-200 rpm and they'd go around the second half in an uncontrollable tail-slide. Scratch one good idea.
