yeah, but that's the hard part...

 

There are two reasons they don't run turbo's. 1. The vibration alone from the chassi will cause them to littlerally shatter hanging off of the side of the engine. The second reason is they want the power now. The blowers they use are constantly generation boost. They don't any form of bypass. So even at idle they are creating power. Plus with the use of nitro methane, it act not only as a power adding fuel but the cooling effects of the fuel in the quench area of the cylinder head are awsome. Keep in mind they run a mixed fuel of nitro and methonal hense the term nitro-meth. Another point to bring up is the egt's of these engines are so high that the headers are only good for roughly 40 to 50 passes due to the heat cycles they go through. Hot exhaust gas is always needed for propper turbo use. The hotter you can keep the gasses the fas the gas will flow. Companies like HPC and Jet-Hot created ceramic coatings not to reduce radiat temps but in fact to keep internal egt higher than they would normally be in a not coated setup. Which intern generates more power. Bottom line is we don't live in a perfect world and power loss due to adding any form of forced induction is always a factor. But when your seat of your pants is saying "WOW I've never gone this fast before in my life!" are you going to be conserned with how much power it cost to generate more? I think not....

 

The setup on the Aerial Atom generates around 300 BHP from the K20 (A3 I think) and it's a supercharged setup. I would've expected a turbo setup would be required to make that kind of power.

 

^^300BHP is easily attained with a SC on a K series...those motors are completely different animals...

The term supercharger is very often used when referring to a mechanically driven supercharger, which is most often driven from the engine's crankshaft by means of a belt (otherwise, and in many aircraft engines, by a geartrain), whereas a turbocharger is exhaust-driven, the name turbocharger being a contraction of the earlier "turbosupercharger". Because the turbine of a turbocharger is in-itself a heat engine, a turbocharger equipped engine will normally compress the intake air more efficiently than a mechanical supercharger. Turbo Lag is the delayed response of the engine that is due to the compressor coming up to a speed where boost levels are attained. Engines with mechanical superchargers are typically more responsive initially. Because turbochargers are nearly twice as efficient at other methods of supercharging, the "turbo lag" is negligible. Technology in turbocharging has come to the point where turbocharged engines make boost nearly as quickly as mechanically driven superchargers.

Plagerized directly from Wikipedia...( online encyclopedia )

That's them there smart books...

search "turbocharger" on wikipedia.com to see this info...