There are trade-offs, as you can well imagine. One of my friends was the US champion in his class for a couple of years, and he was really anal about tire pressure when we went to the track. He ran his rear tires at 3-4 psi usually, and to avoid spinning his rims out of the tires on take-off, he drilled many holes in the rims and screwed long sheet-metal screws through the rims into the beads of the tires. Low tire pressure translates to maximum contact-patch area, which means a good launch off the line. It does no good to throw a ton of horsepower at the track only to have the rear tires break free and spin.
I have pictures of Steve's car with the sidewalls of the slicks looking all twisted and distorted (and the car pulling a 2' + wheel-stand off the line). Assuming little or no slip, most of that distortion translated into forward acceleration. His car is a 340 Duster, and people would come to the pits to see if he had shoe-horned a big Hemi into the car. Nope! Just a perfectly balanced and tuned 340. BTW, if you look at a piston and rod assembly from a small-block Chevy and compare that to the sheer mass of similar parts from a Mopar car, you'd think Steve was insane to try to make his car competitive in that class.