We have a saying around here: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing at the last possible moment.” For 2013 SEMA show exhibitors who wanted to have a new C7 Corvette in their booth, the window of opportunity was very, very small between receiving the cars and the show’s opening day. And that’s just for companies that were just going to sticker one up as a traffic draw – imagine if you were committed to showing a complete supercharger system for the new LT1 with practically no time to actually work on the car!
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That’s exactly the challenge Edelbrock Performance [2] took on this year. The installation of their Stingray supercharger system went right down to the wire, with the car literally being driven just a few blocks up and down the street to confirm everything was running right before the car was loaded onto the trailer for the trip from Torrance, California to Las Vegas.
Run right it did, though, and that’s a testament to just how good the Edelbrock engineering staff really is. Two things made the quick turnaround possible – advanced CAD data from GM that allowed Edelbrock to get all the critical dimensions right (like hood and cowl clearance) for the Corvette, and ECU calibration and physical dimensions from their 2014 Silverado supercharger project, which was being developed in parallel to the C7 blower.
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Thanks to the shared Gen V engine architecture, the Silverado supercharger and the C7 version could be developed in parallel.
[5]The capacity of the high-pressure direct injection fuel pump is likely to be the limiting factor for LT1 superchargers – at least until upgraded pumps are available…
Since both the Corvette and pickup share similar Gen V direct injection V8 engines, being able to have the Silverado prototype running made it possible to work out a lot of the details and make sure that the test-article supercharger for the Corvette, seen here, would fit and work on the first try. From here, the company will go back to their headquarters and work on refining both E-FORCE systems into production-ready versions for a spring 2014 release.
How much power will they make? Well, there hasn’t been time yet to dial either system in, but based on the results using the same Eaton TVS rotor pack on the C6 Corvette, 150+ horsepower should be an achievable goal. The limiting factor, we are told, is the capacity of the high-pressure direct injection fuel pump, but Edelbrock is already considering a high-output version of the E-FORCE kit that would include an increased-capacity pump to allow higher boost.
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And here’s an extra bonus for those of you with more tradition tastes – Edelbrock has taken that same Eaton rotor technology and packaged it with vintage looks in a blower package for carbureted LS3 engines – you have to see it to believe it!