Supercharging the FRC

When I bought the FRC it had it had a very high performance engine in it. A Darton M.I.D sleeved 427 stroker that ran on race gas. However, it turned out the engine had seen better days. My friend had it rebuilt while he owned it but the damage was larger than what a rebuild could fix. After a summer of enjoying the car it became apparent the engine was not fixed.

I had been driving it for about a year and a half with cammed 6L engine which was 90% of the time more enjoyable than the race engine it had in it before. But for that 10% of the time…I desperately missed the raw power it used to have. I had been researching supercharger kits for it but it just wasn’t in the cards as I was concentrating on the shop.

At this same time my Dad had been shopping Corvettes off and on for a couple years. He really liked the C6s but kept coming to the same conclusion I did…they were just too expensive. An acquaintance of mine had a heavily modified C5 coupe that among the many mods was supercharged. The gears started turning in my head as I thought my Dad and I could go in on this car together. I could return it to stock using a combination of parts from my car and original parts off of the modified car. I pitched idea to my Dad thinking he would shoot it down but turned out he was game! He really liked the color and his portion of the cost was about half what a c6 would have cost. Perhaps he also liked the idea of helping me out too…

I began tearing the two cars apart:

When supercharged my Dad’s mostly stock Corvette made 525whp. I figured since I had a slightly bigger engine and was cammed I should be able to hit 600whp. I tuned it enough to make the 2 hour drive to get dyno tuned. It ended up making 635whp which felt significantly faster than the race motor it used to have.