ORIGINAL: 1971Chall
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.
Ecotech? Ecotec engine family is a GM I4 engine line. If you mean Ford, you probably are meaning the "Twin-Force" engines. I for one prefer naturally aspirated engines. The thing I have a problem with is one a company has to resort to forced air-induction because they can't get decent power out of their engines without it even after taking the higher technology approach just to stay competitive with the old school engine designs. Ford seems like they have had to resort to this a lot in recent history and that makes me loose respect for them when they do this instead of taking more natural approaches to upping the power. To me, it is like overusing a trump card or diplomatic immunity to cover an error. You can say that about Chrysler using cubic inches, but the issue is there is they built that engine because none of their V8s at the time could produce enough power to make the Viper competitive for the Supercar arena and making an exclusive V10 engine was what made the Viper stand out. The thing to me that proves that route is the better route is the fact that the power has been over doubled when people like Hennessey do add forced air induction. This leaves more room for us later to modify our cars. Also I have heard that GM might not be doing that smaller V8 approach so let's not count our chickens before they hatched.