"EcoBoost" is an ingenious bit of marketing.
Heh, its a shamelessly misleading bit of marketing, but ingenious.
I am fine with them restricting the Hemi moniker to performance cars.
Talking about old-school factory muscle car street racing.. you realize you are comparing stock, lightly or badly modified motors, right? The Hemi's potential was pretty ridiculous compared to most of the other stock big blocks. And talking about the Hemi being weak off the line? Guys.. we dont use 60's-era fuel control and cam design anymore. Engines being weak at low rpm BECAUSE they were strong at high-rpm is a thing of a bygone era, why bother talking about it?
Also, the Hemi engine itself suffers not from lack of awesomeness but from the way chrysler's been run in the last decade. The glass ceiling of hemi horsepower would have been a lot higher if M-B and AMG had mover their own up a little bit. As of right now... and the last how many years?.. the srt hemi has been rated at 425 chp or something like that. WAAY back when the hemi first was released, Hot Rod magazine took a stock (345hp non-srt) hemi, put a cam and headers on it and revved it to 7000 rpm, and it made 481 hp. That is a NON srt motor with VERY few mods. All this time later the supercharged gt500 and Zr1 arent much past that, and there arent many supercharged Hemis that DONT make that power. If the v-10 hadn't been grandfathered in before the hemi came on the scene, do you honestly think the hemi would still be rated at 425 hp?
So basically, to talk about the hemis actual potential, new or old, you REALLY need to consider the politics and technology of the day.. whether its cams and carbs making the 426 'soft' on bottom or the new hemi suffering from brand mis-management and a glass ceiling at the hands of Daimler-Benz.
