There are limitations to how much horsepower you can safely run on the street. Lots of people will happily tell you this “fact” when you reveal that your car makes a little more power than a boring commuter car. Where are you going to use all that juice, they ask, when you are stuck in traffic?
It’s a valid question, if you are some kind of loser dipshit. The turbocharger isn’t for when I’m stuck in traffic. No, that shit is for merging. In order to understand the correct tactical application of nearly one freight locomotive’s worth of artificially supplemented airflow, you must first know the mind of the asshole trying (whether deliberately or not) to block my merge.
My opponent – and make no mistake, anyone blocking my merge even for a millisecond is in opposition to my goals and entire way of life – believes that my rusty shitbox is slow, noisy, and smoky. They think that if I get in front of them, the front end of their car will be showered with oil and fragments of piston rings. This is a reasonable belief, mostly because it’s true, but there is also a classism behind this that I find infuriating. How dare this person with a ratty looking car get ahead of me in traffic.
So you see, putting one-thousand-five-hundred brake horsepower of air from a one-hundred-eighty-dollar eBay turbocharger the size of a bull elephant into a wheezing smog-era Mopar engine is essential to reverse this attitude. The sight of my shrieking Plymouth reaching Mach Five in the road length of a gnat’s dick while sounding like a diesel locomotive on methamphetamine is a Teachable Moment about egalitarianism, and our collective obligation as human beings to achieve the maximum level of happiness for one another. Also, fuck that guy. Enjoy wiping aerosolized head gaskets off your windshield.
