I ran these photos on BangShift years ago, back when the site was read by two people….Chad and I. For whatever reason, I was struck with inspiration to bring them back out and tell the story of how I happened upon this creation and the guy behind it. Mind you, these photos were taken more than a decade ago in my apartment complex at UMass Amherst, the place affectionately called, “Zoo Mass” back then. This “supercharger” setup was a product of the atmosphere of the place. We’ll call the kid who owned this car Joel. I wasn’t super friendly with Joel, but his Fox-body was pretty cool and he lived across the road from my friend Dave. Joel liked a lot of stuff but being sober wasn’t one of those things.

Being the upstanding and semi-regular class attending student I was, my mornings were spend on campus either in class or at work in the UMass bus garage. I happened to be coming home from a shift at the garage when I pulled into my apartment complex and saw exactly what you see below staring me in the face. With the car was a truly wild-eyed Joel who bouncing around like Yosemite Sam was shooting at the ground below his feet. Even then, I always had my camera with me. Of course before I had a smart phone, that meant a film 35mm SLR camera, which is what I shot these photos with. It was a show stopper.

A pair of leaf blowers strapped down to the top of the engine with PVC pipe plumbing it all into the stock airbox and sealed with duct tape. Best of all it was idling right there in front of me. Blowers running full bore and the car surging some, the whole thing was a complete mind-F. I had never seen anything like it. Joel shut the car off and told me that he had been running the thing up and down a piece of straight highway that was near our apartment complex and the car felt faster than it was pre-blowers. He was speaking 100mph and darting around. He shut the car off and I took these photos. He asked me if I wanted to go for a ride about 100 times and I causally refused each time. I wasn’t so much afraid of the blowers (the cheap Chinese plastic gas tanks on top of a hot engine WERE weirding me out) but afraid that he’d kill me in his state of euphoria.

Joel knew I worked at the drag strip and he asked me if they would let the car run in that state. I told him that there wasn’t a chance in hell. He tried to put the sales job on me and I let him know that he was more than welcome to show up at Lebanon Valley Dragway with the car in the state you see it here but they were never going to let it down the track. He was bummed, but after a couple minutes he fired up the car, lit off both blowers and laid a couple gears of rubber down the road. We heard him in the distance all afternoon streaking up and down the highway. The small local PD never got wind of it, or they were waiting for natural selection to exact its toll.

As you’ll remember Finnegan and Freiburger did this test on a Corvette that they had (which Chad now has possession of) and made horsepower on the dyno. They went whole hog last year with the four blower setup in their Monza and made power on the dyno but didn’t gain much in speed on the Ohio Mile. If their research bore out in this Mustang, it was probably a little faster than it was before he spend a few hundred bucks on blowers, tie downs, and PVC piping along with the tape. He could have just stuck nitrous on and made some real power, but his thinking was clearly clouded.

The epilogue on Joel is perhaps more interesting than the leaf blowers. The guy kind of lost his mind…like literally.

There was this cool woodland area that we used to go four wheeling in during college. It was nothing crazy, but the trails were fun and the scenery was super nice. The road gradually got worse to the point where you could only take a car so far and then it was trucks only. One day we were driving in with a line of trucks and about a quarter mile into the woods we saw Joel’s Mustang! The blowers were long gone. We didn’t know how he even got the thing that far but there it was. Another quarter mile up we see the guy down in this gulch building, of all things, a dam in the little river running through it. We’re talking a dam here, folks. He’s not like stacking stones, he is laying trees over and doing all this work. We didn’t spend too much time with him that day but as my buddy Dave tells it, the kid quit going to school all together and just went to his happy place at the dam every day from there on out. Who saw that coming?

I have often wondered about whatever happened to his car….it was pretty sweet.

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE THE DUAL LEAF BLOWER SUPERCHARGER AT UMASS CIRCA 2001 –