Objectives in terms of pollutant emissions and fuel consumption reduction have led car manufacturers to enhance the technical definitions of combustion engines. The latter should now be considered as multiple-input multiple-output nonlinear systems with saturated actuators. This considerably increases the challenge regarding the development of optimal control laws under the constraints of constant cost reductions in the automotive industry. In the present paper, the use of a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) scheme is studied for the air path control of a turbocharged gasoline engine. Specifically, a zero dimension physics-based model is combined with parameterization of the future control trajectory. The use of Laguerre polynomials is shown to increase flexibility for the future control trajectory at no cost in computational requirements. This increase in flexibility leads to an improvement of the transient response of the closed-loop with respect to traditional approaches. This practical application shows that this approach makes it easier to fine-tune the NMPC scheme when dealing with engine air path control.