Turbo firebird

I was talking to my last roomate, and he told me about this system for the V6 firebird and camaro. It's a turbo that is placed under the back of the car betweed the rear wheels and the bumper. The piping runs from the exhaust to the turbo and another pipe goes from the turbo to the intake, with the piping running along the bottom of the car. With them there, It functions as an intercooler cooling off the air before it gets to the intake. Then an exhaust pipe runs off the turbo out the back of the car.

I thought it was pretty damn cool because a V6 firebird that gets about no aftermarket support is putting out around 350-400 ponies.

It used to be thought of as snake oil, but rear mounted turbos do make power. They don't make ideal power since it takes longer to spool up the turbo and even longer for the compressed air to make it back to the engine, but they do work.

It provides very little bang-for-buck. A supercharger costs about as much and makes better power and street manners, but the rear turbo is a viable option.

it just that my roomate was looking for a supercharger for his car and nothing seemed to be availible except for the supercharger off the Grand prix GT, and it needs some modification to fit anyways. Plus the turbo is really unique

This system would produce huge turbo lag. It would take several seconds for the turbo to fully pressurise the intake manifold....which would make any kind of high performance driving very frustrating.
It might be useful on trucks and tow vehicles, though.

Rear mounted turbo? It sounds like a plumbing nightmare and big $$.

It would deffinately have extreme turbo lag, that's for damn sure. He'd be slow as hell off the line. If he has a manual, he could probably keep it lag-less on turns and braking, ect. But with an automatic there wouldn't be nearly as much ability to prevent lag from reoccuring when / after slowing down and stopping, unless he's a really good left-foot braker.

Car Craft or Hot Rod just tested one for a TPI F-body and noticed almost no lag at all. What helped it out was that it was a smaller turbo than normal for several reasons. The cooler denser exhaust didn't need as much turbo size, the piping could be smaller to keep velocity up, and the cooling effect of the long piping meant it didn't need as much diameter.

The turbo was tuned as a low-rpm torque booster and didn't extend its RPM range. If they had used a larger turbo to extend the TPI's RPM range, it sure would have tons of lag, but as it is its not too bad.

I was skeptical too, but if anyone would put it down it would be those two magazines, but whichever one wrote about it actually had completely turned their opinion on them.

I think the guys doing it would have said something about it being really laggy but there was a video of the guys burning out and driving around it really didn't seem to be lagging to much.