Hi Joe,
>Rather surprisingly, ram air was not supplied to the main stage blower, only to the auxillary stage.
Have you ever seen a diagram of the supercharger intake arrangement? I'm not quite certain on how the description translates into a system.
>This anomally explains why a Corsair handily outperforms a Hellcat at lower altitudes. The Corsair's main stage was fed ram air and thus gained a significant amount of power.
Well, I don't believe this is a correct intepretation. Below full throttle height, you actually lose power to ram effect because the throttle has to be closed further to avoid overboosting, deteriorating volumentric efficiency.
Ram effect is beneficial above full throttle height only.
The reason for the Corsair's superior speed is its smaller frontal area (there's little to chose between the wings), made possible by embedding the air intakes into the wing root. As mentioned above, the gull-wing arrangement helps to reduce fuselage-wing interference drag, too.
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)