The Vortech Supercharger

To those in the know, for well over a decade now, Vortech have been synonymous with excellence in supercharging. The stand-out thoroughbred in a stable full of, well… pretty good-looking horses, quietly going about their business of helping drivers win races. This has been reflected in the fact that they have received not one, but three prestigious SEMA awards for Best Engineered New Product. 

To manage this feat, they embraced the radical, like sticking gears in a centrifugal supercharger, by slapping on an air bypass valve and then introduced the idea of an air/oil combo mist system! Not bad, huh? Someone was applying their grey matter.

But let me wind the clock back, if I may and give a little Gallic nod in recognition of those across the oggin that went before. The inspiriation for Superchargers first materialised from the most unlikely angle. A method was needed to increase the temperature of industrial blast furnaces. It was accepted that, if one could increase the amount of air going in, combustion would be upped and therefore, the furnace temperatures could be boosted. In 1860, the Roots Brothers came up with the solution; a way of pushing more air into the fire and so the Roots Blower Company, Indiana, was born.

However, it was Scotsman Sir Dugald Clerk in 1878 who first applied this concept to his new two stroke engine and then a certain Gottlieb Daimler who gained the first German supercharger patent. Indeed, the Germans loved the whole idea of it and in 1921 Mercedes were the first to introduce blowers into production cars.

Before you don lederhosen and skip off in to a Bavarian sunset, it would be entirely remiss of me not to pause here and rewind a tad to 1902, when Louis Renault patented the very first centrifugal supercharger and the granddaddy of the modern supercharger, so familiar to us all today.

There are essentially three kinds of car supercharger, the ‘Roots’ blower, the screw supercharger and the ol’ centrifugal. All of them have a place in the development and history of motor-racing, the Roots blowers of the Sixties and Seventies perhaps being the most familiar to many, owing to their less than shy and retiring position on the motor…

However, the way forward in terms of power to weight gain lay in the centrifuge. These days, crank driven and rotating at anything up to 65,000rpm, they’re the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck. Though you better have beefed up the rest of your lump, if you don’t want that bang abruptly curtailing your tarmac shenanigans.

As mentioned, what is needed to gain horsepower is an increase in combustion. Essentially, fuel burns optimally at a pretty strict ratio of 14:1, that is, 14 parts air to one of fuel. So there’s no point dumping buckets of high octane in the cylinder and expecting the magic to happen, if you’ve neglected to balance it with commensurate handfuls of air. And not just any air, but nice, clean, cool air.

So this is where the blower comes in. Its job is simply to ram as much air as it can into the air inlet, increasing the capacity of the engine to burn your money petrol. I could get quite dull here and start talking about boost and turbochargers, but I won’t.

What Vortech have been doing since 1990, is reassessing what is, in effect, a pretty straightforward concept and refining it with ever more ingenuity- making the units even lighter and mountains of air even more compressed, whilst still retaining moderate temperature. For, as any schoolboy knows, if you compress a gas, you will increase its temperature and that is something that an engine abhors, leading as it does to the premature ignition of fuel.

And no woman likes prematurity.

The chaps at Vortech are constantly on the move to improve their various models, working closely with the racing community to find any advantage and capitalize on it. But also to pull the thing apart, go back to basics and say ‘How can this be improved? Forget tweaking what we already have, how can we essentially radically redesign this, to create a massive advantage, that no one else has thought of?’ And it’s the recognition of this that has seen so many hard-won US patents and indeed awards, over their 23 years in the industry.

Atop this, is the knowledge that you’re buying a quality piece of gear that will transmit smooth power from the accelerator, without any nasty surprises, so lending itself perfectly to the vagaries of racing.

I think though that what stands Vortech head and shoulders above the competition for the punter, is actually the ease with which these units can be installed on their vehicles, with any number of blogs and testimonials featuring owners with relieved grins on their faces, when they found out how simple it all was to fit. 

That and the excellent support afforded by the manufacturer. Forget boost, that’s an edge right there, right?