Getting blown

The ne plus ultra, the mega mother, the big cheese, the shite, the be-all-end-all, of major horsepower gains in automobiles always comes down to two little things: air and fuel. And I very quickly learned, after falling in love with Dixi and wanting to do just about ANYTHING for her, that the Stairway To Heaven was supercharging. Or, as the boys like to say, "getting blown."

The MMR tube discussed yesterday is one in a series of incremental upgrades you can make to increase horsepower. It's the car version of Small Ball, a single here, a stolen base there, a sacrifice bunt to move the runners up...little dinky things that, taken separately, are essentially not noticeable when you park yer booty in the driver's seat. I've seen people claim they can tell or feel the difference in a 5 horsepower increase. I can't, at least not yet. So the Small Ball approach means purchasing a whole bunch of things and getting an overall additive increase -- which in The Dix's case is about 40 hp -- in bits and pieces that you probably can't even detect. It's like that summer you did all your growing...you didn't FEEL any taller, day to day, but over the course of six months it was like, damn, how'd these pants shrink so much?

The beauty of the supercharger is that you get a bathtub full of hp in one fell swoop. If I took the plunge and decided to get Dixi blown -- Danger, Will Robinson, similes and metaphors not working in concert! -- it's 80-120 hp, boom, instant butt-kicker.

For around $6,000.

Yeah, you read that right. The kits available for the V-6 are running between $3800 and $4600 right now, and they all say "10-12 hours installation." I'd have NO SHOT doing that myself -- don't have the tools, or the skeels -- so at $80 an hour, the going rate for car performance shops in the mid-Atlantic region, you're talking another grande or so. Add tax, the inevitable "few extra parts", and you're at 6K.

And when you do the math, as per previous post, on hp per dollar...you'll see that a blower ain't that great a deal either. $50 per horsepower, as compared to $40 for the MMR tube. Which argues in favor of a Small Ball approach.

The problem is...you run out of choices pretty quickly. And then you're either happy with what you've got, or you keep wanting more. More cowbell. More power.

So here's a great article about air, and the basics of getting blown. I'll do it, someday...it's inevitable...maybe when the new version of the Stanger comes out, at which point the prices for aftermarket stuff on the older models will go down. It's an illness, this modding...a terminal illness...