Jumping ForwardAfter the baseline had been established, we began our long quest to build the most power possible using nothing but off the shelf parts. We created perfection in several categories; one of which was supercharged with what we like to think of as the "most power on pump gas".
In order to meet the pump gas challenge we had set forth for ourselves, we opted to install a small (177ci) Roots-style Weiand supercharger. This little two-lobe blower sits on top of a cast-aluminum Weiand intake manifold and pumps more air into the engine than it could normally breath in giving it the power-producing capacity of a much larger displacement engine. In other words, it kinda turns a 350 into a 502. But, installing a blower is not a task one should take lightly. It's a serious jump in performance and there are several key precautions one must take to ensure your blown engine doesn't blow.
Beginning with T19 we installed a set of aluminum Trick Flow Specialties (TFS) cylinder heads to lower DM's compression to a more blower-friendly 8.5:1. The new heads also gave us some extra airflow flow capacity with their big intake ports. We baselined the engine with the TFS heads, an Edelbrock Performer RPM Air Gap manifold and Demon carb, and a COMP Cams hydraulic blower camshaft to see how it would compare blown to unblown.
Here are the unblown specs for DM.T19: TFS aluminum heads (Summit Racing PN TFS-30400013-CNC, 72cc chambers, 195cc runners, 2.02/1.60 valves), TFS pushrods (Summit PN TFS-21407850), Edelbrock RPM Air-Gap manifold, COMP Cams NX274H camshaft (274/292 advance duration, 230/244 duration at .050, .487/.501 lift, 113 LS) straight up. COMP Cams 1.6:1 Pro Magnum roller rockers.
The lower compression and large camshaft didn't seem to hurt DM that much. In fact, it had some serious top end pull with 444 hp at 6,100 rpm. Low-end torque fell off, but we expected that since we were running a pretty big cam combined with very low compression. But once we added the blower and made a few tuning tricks, DM came alive with over 600 hp! All 600 ponies were made on 100-octane unleaded pump gas from 76 Racing.
Here are the specs from the best supercharged test for DM.