ORIGINAL: lear4406
I bought the April Motor Trend mag. and it has a nice picture of the 2008 Challenger. But that really is all. They were not able to test it due to weather conditions. They were able to test an R/T Charger and a Pontiac G8 GT. I really would like someone to tell me why they would use a 5.7 Charger against a 6.0 G8. They use price as the factor and then they test performance. Seems to me an SRT-8 6.1 would be a better comparison. But they state that the price of the R/T is still more than that of the G8. OK I'll give you that... but if you want to test top of the line with top of the line and a 6.0 against a 6.1 would be more fair. I guess if you want the results to add up to what you want them to be then that is the road you go down.
I'm a car guy who thinks you should make it as fair as possible and test auto vs auto, standard vs standard. I've seen MT test multi dollar Ferraris and Porches against Vettes and Vipers. Then it seemed like a fair performance shoot out. Forget $$$$ they wanted a fair fight. But then when it suits them they use the $$$$ as a fair way to test two unequal cars. Sheesh guys, it a'int that hard and you should'nt make it that hard. I feel they don't want to make it fair. As far as pressure vs NA. If you got to go with boost... then test it against something with boost. I'm glad Dodge makes the power without resulting to blowers. Leave that to the folks to add. I find it weak to have to resort to boosting a Stock V-8 to keep up with other brands NA. GM is doing this with the Vette to keep up with the Viper and Ford did it sooner with the 4.6 and the 5.4. I-4s and I-6s, V-6s are fine from the factory boosted. But when you have to boost your V-8s to keep up[&o] just sad. Yeah they haul the mail, but in my eyes, they blinked first. Some will disagree with me and thats fine, but thanks Dodge for keeping your eyes open longer.
Playing Devil's advocate for a moment.........The engines that are using the superchargers are much smaller in displacement than the NA aspirated engines of the vehicles they are competing against so it's not as unequal as it first appears. Displacement in itself is a power adder of sorts. The Viper uses a 510 cubic inch V-10. The LS-9 in the Corvette is about 380 Cubic inches. 130 cubes is a lot of ground to make up for sure. It really depends on how you like your power. The main advantage of boosting an engine(turbo or supercharge) is to keep the smaller displacement for better fuel economy but have the punch of a larger motor when needed. I would say in the very near future the big inch naturally aspirated engines will become the exception and you will see a larger movement to turbo's and superchargers. Check out the new Ecotech engines Ford is working on. There was also a recent article where a Chevy engineer was stating the Corvettes top engines would drop down in displacement closer to 5.0 liters and use a power adder. This was all in response to the latest CAFE regulations passing. Anyway, I wouldn't consider it lame, just another way of getting power.