Variable Compression, Variable Displacement you decide

[Matthew B. Watts]

This part gives me an idea...

>Yes they supers have a bad habit of wasting power by overcompressing 
>from what all the books say.  It may be bad design on the intakes part,
>but it seems to be very common.  I think it compresses the charge 
>excessively and then it expands while still in the intake.   I guess
>this is a design problem, it may not be a problem in the 
>mass production super cars (ie the perviously made Fort Thunderbird SC,
>and I believe the pontic bonniville).  It is probably a tuning issue
>and the wastegate on the turbocharger fixes most of the issue with 
>the turbo.  That is part of why I claim an electric would help,
>it would be able to now regulate boost without wasting power compressing
>air excessively.

If we stick with free-flow exhaust and compress the intake side,
we can get around throttle response problems and wild cam mods.

What if we hooked-up a CVT to drive a supercharger?

Couldn't we tune the boost ramp-up to anything we wanted?  We could
get ourselves out of the linear belt-drive problem right?

Maybe with some electrical parts added in, we could use a
computer control module to set boost on-the-fly.  Sure we'd
loose some HP in the process, but engines are like money--it takes
some to make more.

Just a thought...

Matt Watts
University of Utah
Formula SAE Racing
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