Tony Bischoff feels the hemispherical combustion chamber and dual spark plugs from the factory are solid advantages for the Gen III Hemi in this supercharged application.
Turk’s opinion on the engines longevity is that of a heads-up racer.
“There has been some rumbling about the need to change the rules to make the engines more robust, and I think that’s a bunch of hooey, to be blunt,” he says. “If you give us rules, we’re going to push to the edge of the rules. If they told us we could have O-ringed blocks, we’d start finding ways to blow up O-ring blocks.”
Another challenge experienced along the way, was the non-traditional intake manifold design of the twin-screw supercharger.
“You’ve got to cam [a Whipple engine] correctly. I mean, any motor has to be cammed correctly, but because of the Whipple design, and this is the same for all three [engine] designs, the blower is right on top of the engine. That is where it originally threw me for a loop, for lack of a better term,” Bischoff says. “There is no real intake runner on them anymore. There’s basically just a cylinder head and the plenum with no big, long runners. That changes the cam design a lot. You’ve got this little short manifold, with the blower sitting right on top of it. The motors ended up wanting a lot different cam than I thought they’d want.”