This is 100% BangShift approved mechanical madness. The videos you’ll see after the jump feature a dragster in British Columbia, Canada running a roots blown small block Chevy engine. The catch is that there’s a Harley V-twin mounted ahead of the engine turning the supercharger. Talk about free boost? While here it is!
This creation is totally home made and is insanely brilliant. The major argument or strike against the roots blower is that it robs a bunch of horsepower from the engine to spin the thing, especially at speed. . Turbochargers are far more efficient from that perspective, but the instant boost of an old school roots is something that has to be experienced by all hot rodders at least once in their lives and belt driven intake manifolds are still very much at home at the digs.
Anyway, the guy who designed and built this dragster (which seems to be based off of a late 1970s/early 1980s Top Fuel chassis) had the idea of taking the load of turning the blower off of the engine and placing it on another dedicated power plant. We have no idea how he regulated the speed or managed to coordinate the RPM of the Harley engine and the air needs of the Chevy, but it appears to work pretty well. The best pass shown on the videos is a 5.60 in the eighth-mile. It isn’t world beating (yet) but the fact it actually works and runs, impresses the hell out of us!
Update: This item originally ran in December of 2010 – Jean Beauregard who built and owns the dragster recently let us know of a new video regarding the revived digger. We don’t think the car has seen the strip since a massive wheelie killed the chassis and caused large amounts of engine damage. The damned thing is still so cool we wanted to run this blog item again.
\
Innovation at it hot roddings best. Nice find!!!
Technicall, engineering wise, this is just plain and simple BS! “Free Horsepower”? Nonsense. You should be ashamed to use those words here. Interesting? Weird? Cartoonish? YES! But, it’s a terrible inefficient way to drive the blower. Ask ANY engineer, and they’ll back me up!