[texan]

First off, increasing air velocity and supercharging a motor are two VERY different things. One increases manifold pressure, one decreases it by increasing column velocity without increasing volume (you can figure out which is which on your own). Velocity is a very important component to airflow through an engine, but so is efficiency in airflow path. The shortest possible distance between two airflow points in an engine is a straight line, and not so surprisingly it's also the most efficient. Creating swirl in the combustion chamber is all fine and good; creating it in the intake is counterproductive for most purposes.

Those intake spacers are effective because they are thermal barriers and they contribute to plenum volume, it's not surprising that Poweraid's claim of the helix spacers working so well is tied into two other proven performance concepts at the same time. How would anyone know which attribute of the spacer is hard at work and which is just there taking up space, and what would any of these have to do with mounting silly little fan blades in the intake path?

Spiralmax and like products are a bunch of bullshit, plain and simple. If it were so easy to increase the performance and mileage of the average passenger car engine, don't you think these things would come stock on every car? Automotive engineers are a generally intelligent and creative group, and this snake oil concept has been bouncing around in it's dark recesses for some time; it hasn't reached mainstream acceptance in all this while for very good reason. In fact, if you look at the last 30 years of intake and exhaust routing enhancement, you'll notice almost all improvements have centered around improving airflow through the simplifying of pathways and removal of turbulence restrictions.

To put it plainly, simplicity is the mother of efficient airflow, not restriction.