ok so colder air is better. CAI gives you a tiny advantage(maybe). The CO2 'bulb' and tank systemseems a good idea but it is a only a few minutes of maybe slightly colder air.and a lot of extra crud on the car..so i'm thinking...and perhaps I am an idiot..but...perhaps there would be a way to route the Air Conditioner ducting into the intake flow or into a 'double walled' jacket around the intake pipe and cool it down substantial over long periods of time ? or would the A/c energy drain on the engine negate any possible gains? Is there a 'formula for 'air temp=gain?'......how much HP does the ac suck?

musing at midnight.

 

Many are using on superchargers...the AC water to cool the s/c for instant gains like nitrous, it significantly cools the intercooler which cools the s/c. I guess it could be rigged to an intake.

 

here is a late night response..... rule of thumb as I have understood is that for every 10 degrees you lower your intake air temp. you gain 1%

so if you effectively lower the air going into the engine 20 degrees, at full throttle remind you, you will gain almost 5hp

 

I doubt this would be very effective, unless you had a giant AC that could blow about 500 cfm...at that point you would have an electric supercharger (not a very big one at that). I doubt our AC blows anywhere near that much. In fact, if you routed you AC directly to the spot where the normal filter goes and only allowed your AC to provide all the intake air, I'm guessing you'd create a vacuum on the AC under WOT or high rpms, starve your engine of air creating lean conditions, and eventually blow up your AC unit from being overdriven due to the vacuum. If you left the filter in place and routed the AC to the intake pipe somewhere, you could obviously avoid lean conditions, but I doubt the gains would be enough to make this a worthy mod when compared with the loss that having the AC on would create....not to mention you wouldn't have any AC in your car...not a good mod for Arizona...it was 115 degrees today .

 

So with some of these thoughts in mind, why not run an intercooler on a non S/C car? Would that do the trick?

 

Ford has already used this idea on their concept for the new Lightning pickup. They call it the "Supercooler" - supposedly a 50-60 hp gain in short bursts.
If you wanted to do something like this on an NA car you could probably set up the intake ducting to run through the AC coils. I'm not sure how effective it would be, I know the dash vents are supposed to be 30 degrees colder than the ambient air, so it might make a 30 degree difference or about 3% power gain. But, you'd also have to take into account the extra restriction in the airflow, so you probably wouldn't see much of a gain at all.