It is not cheaper to buy a well designed, off the shelf turbo kit. For virtually every NA car, bolt-on turbo kits are much more expensive than supercharger kits, either positive displacement or centrifugal. It is cheaper if you buy a crap eBay turbo kit or, on occasion, if you piece together the kit yourself and fab it up in your garage. You get to save the R&D costs in the well designed kit....by doing all the R&D yourself.
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Originally Posted by Skyhound
I'm pretty sure overall cost is the leading reason for Turbo popularity. They improve MPG, are cheaper to manufacture, MOST Car Tuners are not actually skilled drivers to worry about track racing, the BOV sounds cool at shows/meets, and Turbo Lag can easily be fixed by just adding another.
Toyota has never been a brand about straight lines. They make cars to get the best lap times, not 0-60 times.
I feel like Corvette Supercharges because of it's uphill battle of trying to escape Muscle Car status. It wants to be counted among European's great Super Cars which are meant for touring/road racing.
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It's not "trying to escape muscle car status." Corvettes have always been road race cars first, straight line cars second. Notice that there is a factory backed Corvette ALMS/LeMans team, and there is NOT a factory backed Corvette NHRA effort.
That's 60 years of Corvette road racers.
GM used a blower on the ZR1 because it's the cheapest way to make big, reliable power. None of the exotics that make the hp that the ZR1 does can match it for torque. They do it with stratospheric RPM. That's why you can putter around at 80mph in 6th at 2000rpm getting 24mpg. A PD blower gives you a big, fat, flat torque curve. Could GM have done the same thing that Ferrari and Lamborghini do with their NA motors? Sure. It's not hard to build a high rpm NA motor that makes stratospheric HP and little torque. Bolting a blower to a low compression LS3 is just smart. Same thing as the Ford GT, except they stuck the motor behind the driver's head.