At the unveiling of the brand new Stock Eliminator COPO Camaro concept on Monday, the first thing everyone wanted to do was look under the hood to see what GM’s turnkey drag racer was packing. Perched atop the 327 cubic inch LSX block is a Whipple twin screw supercharger, displacing 2.9 liters. It’s a positive displacement design, meaning that each time the rotors complete a full rotation, 175 cubic inches of air gets moved from the inlet to the outlet, and Whipple blowers boast an impressive adiabatic efficiency rating of up to 80%.

One feature of the Whipple supercharger design is a bypass valve that reduces parasitic loss when the engine is running at part throttle.

If you’re wondering what that means, consider a little bit of high school physics. In any mechanical system, it’s never possible to turn 100% of the energy you input into useful work. Some of it always ends up being wasted in the form of heat, and old-school Roots blowers were terrible in this respect, using almost as much crank horsepower to make the intake charge hot as they did to compress it.

From the back, you can see the ports for the integrated air-to-water intercooler's coolant loop.

Whipple’s twin screw design is far more efficient, and it’s coupled with a massive air to water intercooler built in to the manifold to further lower intake temperatures. In drag racing applications for these types of intercoolers where it’s possible to load the heat exchanger tank with ice, air temperatures at the intake valve can actually be lower than the ambient air temperature at low boost, depending on the engine and supercharger combination.

The supercharger used for the COPO Camaro is a "front feed" design with a 122mm inlet. A stainless steel jackshaft takes power from the pulley back to the helical gearset at the rear of the case to drive the rotors.

The 2.9l Whipple supercharger utilized on the COPO Camaro’s 327 is a “front feed” design to keep the intake tract as unrestricted as possible, and has a 112mm inlet. A stainless steel jackshaft delivers power from the 10-rib belt drive to the helical gearset at the back of the case, which turns the “3/5” rotors (the ‘male’ rotor has three lobes than mesh with five helical channels in the ‘female’ rotor, compressing intake air within the case as it moves from inlet to outlet.) The end result is a supercharger system that offers low end response and high RPM flow – a perfect match for GM’s turnkey drag racer concept car.