Hey Jeff,
The definition of (real) horsepower according to google:
"How do you define horsepower? Ask a car enthusiast and most of the time you'll get a blank look, a shrug of the shoulders and maybe a guess along the lines of "What a horse can do!".
Horsepower is defined as work done over time. The exact definition of one horsepower is 33,000 lb.ft./minute. Put another way, if you were to lift 33,000 pounds one foot over a period of one minute, you would have been working at the rate of one horsepower. In this case, you'd have expended one horsepower-minute of energy.
Even more interesting is how the definition came to be. It was originated by James Watt, (1736-1819) the inventor of the steam engine and the man whose name has been immortalized by the definition of Watt as a unit of power. The next time you complain about the landlord using only 20 watt light bulbs in the hall, you are honoring the same man.
To help sell his steam engines, Watt needed a way of rating their capabilities. The engines were replacing horses, the usual source of industrial power of the day. The typical horse, attached to a mill that grinded corn or cut wood, walked a 24 foot diameter (about 75.4 feet circumference) circle. Watt calculated that the horse pulled with a force of 180 pounds, although how he came up with the figure is not known. Watt observed that a horse typically made 144 trips around the circle in an hour, or about 2.4 per minute. This meant that the horse traveled at a speed of 180.96 feet per minute. Watt rounded off the speed to 181 feet per minute and multiplied that by the 180 pounds of force the horse pulled (181 x 180) and came up with 32,580 ft.-lbs./minute. That was rounded off to 33,000 ft.-lbs./minute, the figure we use today.
Put into perspective, a healthy human can sustain about 0.1 horsepower. Most observers familiar with horses and their capabilities estimate that Watt was a bit optimistic; few horses could maintain that effort for long." (end quote)
Horsepower however, does not always determine who
will be at the finish line first, in the shortest amount of time.