Experimental Turbo Vette Was a Grasp to Fix the Power Outage
Automobiles were suffering in the ’70s, thanks to hinderances like safety restrictions, emissions restrictions, and oil crises. The horsepower was dwindling, and manufacturers were looking for places to replace that power while maintaining good gas mileage. Like today, some companies turned to turbos to try to find the solution. Chevy even tried it with the Corvette at one point, making three prototypes that never made it into production.
The second car of these tests was called the Phase II. It kept the 350-cubic-inch L82 V8 engine from the original car, but it was slightly modified with an L48 camshaft. The turbo used in the experiment was an AiResearch T3 turbo with an integral wastegate mounted on the right side of the engine on the exhaust manifold. At full power, boost got to seven PSI. A Delco controller was used for ignition timing, and Chevy used a Buick knock sensor.
The final product wasn’t a production-ready car, but it gave GM and Chevy a good sense of what was possible, and as mentioned before, they ended up making a Phase 3 Turbo Vette to complete the research. There are no horsepower estimates for this modded engine, but Chevy told Road & Track that it was capable of the quarter-mile in the 13s. Read more about it here.
via [R&T]