Originally Posted by Mike Rainbird

Before I finally settled on my current engine format, I seriously investigated the route of dual charging the engine. My remit to Harvey has always been ultimate response, so a plan was hatched to bolt on a super-charger that would run on the engine from idle to 4000rpm, whereby a large turbo would take over the supply duty, to have the best of both worlds.

He figured out everything required from scratch to get it to work AND fit in the engine bay and a suitable electronic clutch control was sourced from a Mercedes (which would be controlled by the T6 to disengage at the point the turbo was making enough boost to get a smooth switch-over), along with a K-gate to allow the switch in flow to the engine between the two and we were ready to go.

Unfortunately the program was abandoned due not being able to package a big enough supercharger in the space we had. Disappointingly the one you can see in the picture could not provide the power from idle to 4000rpm to make it worth while. All the bigger ones that could provide this, were simply too big to fit on the side of the engine .

Stavros will now remember why I was so interested in those superchargers that had variable speed gearing on them to enable them to provide LOTS of boost low down, but able to tail off at higher rpm to stop the supercharger from exploding . Unfortunately, this Russion technology doesn't seem to have filtered to the after-market even now .

It would have had the best of both worlds - response and outright power, without the parasitic loss of constantly connected supercharger, which would have disengaged by 3500-4000rpm. Just thought peeps might like to see that things do go on behind the scenes .