Power for the People

A ProCharger P-1SC-1 supercharger wakes up a 2016 Camaro SS quite nicely.

- Nick Licata

With the release of the 2016 Camaro SS, fans of Chevy’s late-model muscle car were rewarded with some great news: the car got a nice bump in horsepower and also shed a little weight compared to the previous-generation Camaro. The sixth-gen went to a 455hp 6.2L LT1 engine while the fifth-gen housed a 426hp LS3—an improvement of 29 horsepower. Now, that might not sound like a huge increase, but when you add into the equation that the sixth-gen also lost 200 pounds in the process, that nearly 30 more horsepower becomes much more noticeable. The weight loss also gave the car quite a bit more agility compared to its more portly predecessor.

Although the performance offered by the sixth-gen is fine for the general Camaro SS enthusiast, there are a lot of us that just can’t leave well enough alone—and that’s a good thing.

Among us are the folks at ProCharger Supercharger Systems. They’ve been building centrifugal superchargers for over two decades and pride themselves on producing not only horsepower, but reliable, intercooled horsepower for a wide range of performance cars: early- or late-model and for street and race applications. So with the LT1 powering the 2016 Camaro SS, the ProCharger crew couldn’t wait to dig into the Camaro’s architecture to host their P-1SC-1 centrifugal supercharger. Having experience with the LT1 by way of the 2014-and-newer Corvette, they were plenty familiar with the inner workings of the engine’s technology so the bulk of the work was to design an intercooler to fit within the confines of the area just ahead of the radiator and fitting the supercharger within the busy engine bay without any permanent modifications to the car.