What do you plan on doing with the power? Honestly, when you get much more power you need a plan with itmes like uspension, braking, cooling and other systems. Somewhere around 600 the tires start to be a weak link for the street, especially if you have 3.55 or higher gears.
Best of luck!
Bingo!You just identified the main problem,at least for the street.(A car running on race tires,ie.slicks,is a bit different animal)For the sake of simplicity,let's take the SRT10 and the new Z06,both with just over 500HP at the crank.Both are already somewhat traction-challenged on street tires.I drive both,so I have no particular axe to grind here.Say we add 100rwhp to each.We then have a problem with getting that power to the pavement,so we go to stickier tires(if we can find them).
Now that we've hooked up the power better(and quicker)we place more stress on the driveline and suspension components.Beefing them up adds weight,so we get into a weight vs. reliability trade-off.As if that weren't enough,we reach a point of smaller returns for the additional horsepower,that is,a 20% increase in HP does NOT yield a 20% increase in performance.I'd tend to agree that,for the street,we're about done for balanced and reliable performance at around 600rwhp, with either present platform.With the Viper,we can easily reach that through forced induction(supercharger or turbos)with a modest amount of boost.With the LS7 engine,the Vette will have to make the additional power with a cold-air intake,headers,cam and tune;with the high compression,they can't just bolt on a forced induction without modifying the heads,pistons and possibly other internals as well.The general thinking on the Vette side is that if GM does a supercharged Vette,they'll most likely start with the lower compression and smaller LS2 engine,getting a bit over 600HP at the crank,or about 540rwhp.This is in the same range that we might expect from the current LS7 with the mods mentioned above.We already know we can get more than that from the current Viper engine,whether normally-aspirated or forced induction,with mods that are already well-proven from a reliability standpoint.Stock-for-stock,the two cars are about even,with the Vette having a slight edge-with reasonable mods,edge goes to the Viper.
