Ingenuity At Its Finest! An Externally-Mounted Roots Blower Combo

Through decades of research and development and on-track testing and data collection, racers have, by and large, discovered what is and isn’t the best “mousetrap”, if engine and chassis combinations. Rarely do you see a true one-off setup like was so common in the 1950s and 60s, when the sky appeared to be the limit and no combination was so refined that it wasn’t plausible that it could be beaten by something new and unique.

But every now and then, a racer gets a wild hair to try something wildly different, and that’s precisely what a customer of Matheis Race Cars did a couple years ago, when they tasked owner Rob Matheis with not only constructing a complete Pro Modified-style car, but also fabricating one of the more creative power adder arrangements we’ve ever seen.

Borrowing on the concept of the belt-driven ProCharger and Vortech centrifugal superchargers, the customer drew up the idea for mounting an actual roots supercharger — a magnesium case 10:71 — out in front of the engine, with a belt running off the crankshaft to drive it (no different than with the blower mounted on top), and piping to carry the force-fed air up into the intake. This, of course, is quite the departure from the supercharger-on-top combination that’s been the standard setup in drag racing for the better part of six decades.

The engine itself is a 454 cubic inch LSX. Matheis tells us the owner, who was building the car for ADRL competition, was after improved aerodynamics, and felt the supercharger being mounted under the nose rather than out in the wind would result in a slicker and faster race car. With the blower mounted upside down, it also placed the injector hat down at bumper height, mere inches off the racing surface. Matheis utilized a Five Star Chevy Cobalt Pro Stock body, and fabricated the one-off frame for the supercharger out of titanium, while the blower mounting plates are made from magnesium. The car also has titanium wheelie bars, pedals, chute mounts, window frames, and the driveshaft tunnel, to keep it as light as possible.

Unfortunately, the car wasn’t fully completed and, to our knowledge, hasn’t turned a tire — at least not with this combination — to date. But you have to give credit where it’s due for trying to shake up the status quo with something entirely different and unproven.