I understand what you are saying, and thank you for persevering, what I still don’t quite get is that a throttle is a mechanical device governing the flow of fuel into the engine, and as such the rate of flow over time is independent of the engine rpm, no? It purely depends on throttle position. Or does your argument hold because with full throttle at low rpm, the engine is not actually using all the fuel that the throttle position is capable of supplying? As you can tell, I’m no mechanic/engineer, you clearly know a lot more about the subject than me so I’m not picking a fight, just trying to understand.
Whether carbureted or fuel-injected, a gasoline spark-ignited engine endeavors to keep a fairly constant air-to-fuel mass ratio over the entire operating range (there are exceptions, e.g. the deliberate enrichment of the mixture at very high loads to deter knock/ping). The purpose of the throttle plate is to control the flow of air (not fuel) into the engine; it is then the job of the fueling system to provide a flow of fuel that is approximately 1/7th that of the air. A carburetor uses the air flow to cause a pressure drop in its throat that automatically slurps in the fuel at the correct rate; a fuel injection system measures throttle position or manifold air pressure (or both), plus some other factors, then calculates how much air is about to enter the combustion chamber, and then spritzes the correct quantity of fuel into the intake port in a discrete injection event.
A given throttle position will result in a given mass of air being drawn into the combustion chamber during each intake event; the time rate of air flow into the engine will vary then with RPM, since the number of intake events per unit time varies with RPM. A wide-open throttle plate at 600 RPM will not result in the same air flow rate per unit time as a wide-open throttle plate at 6,000 RPM.
I think maybe the piece you’ve misunderstood is the job of the throttle plate. As noted above, it regulates the amount of air ingested for each combustion event, not the amount of air per unit time; the latter parameter is influenced by both throttle position and engine RPM.
Yes, exactly - I was under the misapprehension that the throttle mechanism was directly connected to increasing fuel flow, as opposed to indirectly demanding more fuel due to increased air flow. Thank you very much - that’s another tiny corner of my vast ignorance neatly smoothed off! And I will slightly modify my driving style accordingly (though of course the potential transmission issues resulting from high load at low rpm must also be taken into account, as already noted).