A high stall torque converter can help shift recovery quite a bit, therefore not as easy to "fall off the cam". With the 9.5 Dynamic converter in my 440 car, the RPM at WOT never drops below about 4500 regardless of the shift point.
Which is pretty much what the clutch packs in top-fuelers do anymore. If you listen to them on a run, the RPM's stay pretty constant after launching..... keeping the engine RPM's around the torque peak.
Here is an interesting article related to that. It can get confusing as they go back and forth between torque and HP, but makes the point the peak acceleration occurs when the engine RPM's settle in around peak torque. There is a lot of discussion of HP in relation to budgeting the energy distribution between different energy losses (which is the way to do that computation since a lot of those losses are most easily worked with as HP) and what gets left to accelerate the 'car'. FORGET 8,000 HORSEPOWER ... TOP FUEL IS NOW OVER 10,000 HORSEPOWER! [National Dragster]
