My ducted radiator setup - road racing

[eclipsegsx1736]

I believe the tow hook is just for that purpose. To tow hahaha. On a serious note if you don't have a hook on your car that is easily accessable incase something happens to your car on the track you wont be able to run because its required . The faster they can pull an "injured" car off the track and out of the way of other cars the better. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

To the op I love what your doing. Would love to see you start placing in events.

Yup, that's very true. Tow hooks have to be very accessible. The tow rig guys will hook onto anything they find if they don't see a tow hook, their #1 goal is to get your off track and out of the way ASAP.

Damn Beau, that came out nice. Making me rethink my plans of modifying the Carbontrix vent's small opening to work for this. That upper lip on the hood is bad ass and exactly what I was wanting to do - I was talking to a CF vendor recently wondering if they could create something like that. Can you send me the dimensions? Hell, can you put me in contact with your fabricator? Would you mind sharing the cost of the entire piece? Does the duct actually cover the entire radiator width?

Thanks Chris! It does cover the entire "exhaust" area of the radiator. That was one of the many critical aspects I wanted in the design. I'm very picky when it comes to efficiency I'll send you a PM in a minute

So Andrew made the duct work? Then what did Brian from After Hours (mentioned in post #83) do? From that post, it sounds like he was the one who made the duct work.

Originally I wanted to have Andrew do the duct work as he does awesome work, but I realised that the car really needed to be there in the shop for something like this, so I took it to After Hours, which is a local racecar fab shop. I'm really happy with the work, and he knows a ton about racecar fab and knows exactly what I wanted. I'll also be going to him for his beautiful chassis-mounted front splitters, and a full cage with rear wing mounts.

 

[Ludachris]

I need a head-on shot of the hood to see how it looks. I'm sure it's offset due to the hood hump.

 

[definitiveno]

So I am searching for ducting ideas due to my overheating issues and here I find this gem. I remember your paper template you were building in your garage and now you have a very well polished completed project. Bravo, good sir. Now If you want to start mass producing just give your piece to my neighbor John so he can start making copies and let me know when your first production piece rolls of the assembly line. Good job man.

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

I haven't updated in a while; I posted this over on the DSMLink forums so wanted to share it here!

The car is heavily under the knife at the moment. I'm also in the process of trying to get a NASA approval to run in HPDE4/TT classes, which is required to compete in Global Time Attack. Since my car's not ready to be on track yet, I'm going to be out at Chuckwalla Valley Raceway this weekend in my daily. Got a new AEM AQ-1 datalogger on the car so I'll also be using this weekend to get familiar with track mapping and data analysis on this system. It can piggyback a lot of the stock/DSMLink ECU signals and datalog at a very high data rate (up to 1000hz per channel) so it can actually be used for tuning as well. If anyone cares, I'm shooting to drive at Buttonwillow (CW #13 config) on March 10-11 w/ Speedventures to get some track time on that track (first GTA event is BW CW #13). I'm also planning on doing a shakedown there again April 14-15 on the car, hopefully working on setup for the track. Yes, I know.. one week before the event I'm shaking the car down.. Nothing like cutting it close

Here are some crappy screenshots of the datalogger software if anyone's interested. The screenshots kinda killed the resolution but you get the idea. You can easily overlay RPM vs. Oil Pressure and see trends. As you can see in the screenshots below, there are some areas in higher RPM where the oil pressure had dropped. I clicked on the data point and the data analysis takes you to the plot screen, (2nd screenshot) which clearly shows oil pressure dropping off. In this section of the plot I was taking a hard turn (.85-.95G sustained) when oil pressure dropped a bit near the end. 3rd screenshot shows Boost vs AFR plot, although this one graphs out a bit odd but still very useful:

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[TSiAWD666]

Do you have anything installed or planned to address the drops in oil pressure? I'll be dealing with this problem too as I also have aspirations for TT events. My initial stab at preventing such issues is a 3QT Accusump but I can't give any data as it won't be on the car for at least a month and car won't be on the track probably until late March or April.

Also, would you mind sharing details on your issues with being approved for HPDE4/TT? I too will be going through that soon.

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

Do you have anything installed or planned to address the drops in oil pressure? I'll be dealing with this problem too as I also have aspirations for TT events. My initial stab at preventing such issues is a 3QT Accusump but I can't give any data as it won't be on the car for at least a month and car won't be on the track probably until late March or April.

Also, would you mind sharing details on your issues with being approved for HPDE4/TT? I too will be going through that soon.

The datalog above was on my daily driver GSX 7-bolt engine, not on the race car yet as she isn't ready. The oil was at about at the 3/4 mark on the dipstick when this happened. Every time I've gone out on track in my race car I've filled up about 1/3-1/2 quart over the fill mark and never had oil pressure loss, and I'm sure the lateral G load is considerably higher with the R888 tires I've ran (above log was on 235 width so-so street tires).

I'll be keeping a close eye on it this weekend at the track since I'll be running the R888's on this car just so I don't shred up the street tires, but I'm going to do a similar overfill with the oil hopefully to keep it in check. Plus, I'm going out there for the seat time and experience, not to set any records, so I'm not going to be pushing it at 10/10ths, that's for sure. I'm thinking about an Accusump on the race car, but for 2012 I'll be in street class so I MIGHT be able to get away with stock oiling due to the max 255 tire width and 140 treadwear regulations in that class.

Honestly, I don't have many details on the NASA TT approval just yet, I'll know more after this weekend! I'm hoping between the 2 full days of track time I'll make my way up, but we'll see. I don't want to cut any corners (no pun intended )

Beau

 

[TSiAWD666]

Yeah oil starvation is a huge concern for me. I'll have aero from Drew's body kit going and if I recall correctly in some post after an event he highlighted in his data logs 1.7g lateral on some turns somewhere (willow? I forget...). I'll have 285 tires initially and possibly going larger later so I imagine if I get things adjusted right I could run into problems if I don't prepare, and I don't want to rebuild another Magnus engine any sooner than I have to.

I also picked up one of the Kiggly oil pressure regulators for the head. If these don't do the trick I may have to resort to dry sump like Andrew did.

What about fuel starvation? What have you done for that? I put in a swirl pot in my car and while it's working on the street it only went into the car right before the car went under the knife for the body work.

 

[RipperXX]

Think a crank scraper would help with the oil starvation at all?

 

[knochgoon24]

Most guys run into oil starvation because of poor drainage from the head. Some extra baffling in the the oil pan may help too. A larger capacity oil pan might be a final piece before having to resort to dry sump.

 

[RipperXX]

Since I am just always trying to learn as much as I can. What can be done to help oil drainage from the head?

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

Since I am just always trying to learn as much as I can. What can be done to help oil drainage from the head?

Kiggly Racing - HLA Pressure Regulator

 

[Raph]

As for race car technology and road cars for racing.. all 911s have dry sump setups..(what we dream about..no oil starvation pulling insane g s round a track)

and 2nd, lotus elise,exige,speedster,vx220 and every other elise based chasis i know off has radiator ducting..keeping things col going round a track.

Most guys run into oil starvation because of poor drainage from the head. Some extra baffling in the the oil pan may help too. A larger capacity oil pan might be a final piece before having to resort to dry sump.

true,but pulling high g s on slicks on right corners in evo 4-10 and left corners in dsms and evos 1-3 see the need for a dry sump.. tghe oil just gets sloshed away from the pick up .

same goes for subarus etc, its just when grip goes too far

cool,fast,but the oil pump is going to hate you for it.

Anyone use a kiggly hla on a street car?? any side effects? and on head fed turbos??

 

[RipperXX]

Kiggly Racing - HLA Pressure Regulator

I was under the impression this helped regulate the oil pressure to the head. Im guessing so as to not have an excess of pressure and thus flow/oil in the head at high RPM's. But that doesn't actually help with the draining, just prevents the flooding of the head with oil correct?

 

[ed1380]

It regulates pressure more efficiently by not dumping excess oil in the head

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

Wow, what an awesome track! I’m happy to report that the car (daily driver GSX, not the race car) made it the whole drive out there and back (about 400 miles round trip), and easily over 150 miles of racing on-track. I didn’t touch a wrench the whole weekend, other than to change tires. It’s such a smooth sweeping track that average throttle percentages for the quicker laps were over 50% for the entire lap!

I had some awesome battles with a few cars, and everything went beautifully. Since I’ve never done an official NASA event before, I went out in HPDE 1 first with my instructor on the street tires, just to get a feel for the track and the car. By the 2nd session of day 1, he bumped me up to HPDE 2, which I was in for the 2 remaining sessions of the day. I threw my set of track wheels and Toyo R888’s from my race car and went back out. What a difference! Together with the tires and experience of the track I shaved almost 9 seconds off in the next session. Average lateral G (more on data later) went from .90-.92 up to 1.1-1.2G just with the tire change (and not nearly enough camber to take advantage of the R-comp tires). On day 2, I went to the HPDE2 director and expressed interest in moving upward to HPDE3 and discussed my on-track experience a bit. He decided to give me a test ride the first session of the day. Within 3 laps, he was confident in my ability to run in 3 and signed me off! I ended up staying in HPDE3 for the rest of the day. There was a lot of on-track action in this group, and I had an incredible time. At only ~10-12 psi on the GT30R, I wasn’t too confident in stepping up to HPDE4/TT just yet, the lap times weren’t there and I was underpowered. Coolant temps were about as high as I felt comfortable with near the end of the sessions at that boost level, so I kept it where it was. I was seeing about 210-213F after about 15 minutes of lapping, and oil temps 245-260F max when pushing hard. Ambient temps were around 75F.

I will be uploading in-car videos soon and will certainly post them! I also have a great clip from a fellow HPDE3 driver who I passed late into turn 8, only to have the rear end step WAY out on me, to the point where I was full opposite-lock, but I ended up recovering from the slide, looked pretty cool on cam!

As promised, I had AEM’s new AQ-1 datalogger on the car complete with GPS track mapping, accelerometers, and plenty of vehicle/engine sensors run into it. For those who are interested, I attached a log file of one of the HPDE3 sessions and a Project file that is to be loaded into AEMData software, which will display a complete layout of all the data and the track itself. It should also automatically open up the log file (as long as they are in the same directory) and should extract lap marker and turn data from the project. You’ll need to install AEMData (free) which is available here: Introducing AEMdata for the AQ-1!!! Install the software, download both above files to the same directory (desktop or something) and launch AEMData. Close the Quick Launch window, and go to File --> Open.. --> Open Project and open the project file "98 GSX track mapping". This should launch the entire project and log, including track mapping and lap markers, etc.

In this layout, the default lap view is set to the fastest lap of the day. Some of these laps obviously are significantly slower than each other, where I was stuck in traffic or on a warmup/cooldown lap. You can add in a 2nd lap layer to compare laps to each other directly if you want. The first tab displays 3 lanes of data. You can drag and drop more traces from the channel list into the traces to view them, such as boost, oil pressure, AFR, etc. You can drag the cursor around the GPS track map to move the data along as well. The Channel Reports tab gives you a quick overview of data from this lap, including Min/Max, Averages, etc. The next few tabs contain X/Y plots of data such as RPM vs. Oil pressure, Boost vs. AFR, and a traction circle. You can click on any point in the scatter plot and it will show you the exact point in the Main trace window that it occurred, and will even show you what part of the track and what turn. The Lap Report, Corner Speeds and Track Diagram tabs are my favourites.

The Lap Report tab displays times by each section (turn or straightaway) and highlights in green the fastest sections. It can calculate a Composite Fastest lap (all your best sections from the entire session linked into one “ideal” lap), or a Rolling Fastest lap, which takes your fastest complete circuit of the track, not necessarily starting and ending at the finish line. This is usually more representative of your theoretical fastest lap time. You can see my Rolling Fastest was only 0.6 sec faster than my fastest actual lap.

The Corner Speeds tab is pretty self-explanatory, with blue and green highlights displaying the slowest and fastest entry/exit speeds respectively. The Track Diagrams tab shows the GPS track view, colour coded based on data such as Lateral G, Throttle etc. Gear Ratios is a cool diagram showing time spent in each gear displayed in colour differences.

All of these tabs are fully customisable. In fact, I built this entire project from scratch just to learn, instead of starting with the default template.

One could pour over all this data for HOURS (and this is only one of the 7 sessions I did this weekend), and I’ve certainly put that much time into looking at the data and learning as much as I could about it. Just a few cool observations to show why looking at data can be fun/interesting/useful/make you a faster driver/make the car faster:

In long, steady-state turns when I’m at the limit of the tires, any throttle fed in that increases longitudinal acceleration (straight acceleration) shows a clear drop-off in lateral acceleration. This is due to the tire’s “traction circle”. A tire can only do 100% at a time, whether it’s accelerating or turning. So if you start using 10% of the tire to accelerate, you’ve now reduced your maximum turning grip to 90%. Plus, acceleration removes load from the front tires, therefore further reducing total possible grip at the front.

The lap with the highest average throttle % was also the fastest lap of the day.

Oil pressure held perfectly throughout all sessions, even at the very high G loads of the R888 tires. I did about a ½ quart overfill on the pan and never had an issue even at 1.2+ G!

Boost seemed to increase throughout the session, even though the boost controller did not change. It’s inverse to what I’d expect, at least in relation to air temperatures. It may have to do with the wastegate getting hot and changing tolerances (is this why the new Tial gates have coolant lines?).

Even though I was braking hard and heel-toe downshifting and I felt that I was doing it well enough to not change braking force at all, you can see a slight dropoff in negative longitudinal G (braking) whenever I blip the gas under braking, showing that I’m giving up a bit in the braking zones (could brake later).

Beau

 

[Ludachris]

What track Beau? Buttonwillow?

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

Chuckwalla Valley Raceway.

ChuckwallaValleyRaceway

I went out there last weekend to make my way up through HPDE to eventually get signed off for HPDE4/TT in order to compete in Global Time Attack this season.

 

[Ludachris]

Looks like a fun track!

 

[snowborder714]

Woo hoo for data!!!! Thanks Beau!

What types of things did the instructor note that helped them make their decisions to bump you up the classes?

Sounds like you had a great weekend! I'm sure I'll have more to post after I get to check out the data.

 

[stars]

As you can see from the picture his idea is of a German design from the BMW, 750 iL series I believe. I have seen Mercedes Benz start to do the same thing, here recently. It is way over engineered to begin with and restricts the airflow to the engine compartment. Ever worked on a BMW or Mercedez Benz? Never drop a tool/hardware because you will never find it. That's about what it is like to work on those basturds. Close quarters combat. Almost worse than a Jaguar....well almost.

Your best scenario is to redo your design and relocate it down lower. Modify that design and place it low as such as to "scoop" the air to a point inward and upward. Another words go with the flow in layman's terms. You want to somewhat mimic forced air induction, so redesign what you have and it will work just as good if not better. As others been telling you it is not a good location you have chosen, your restricting the principal reason as to why you have to have a radiator and radiator fan assembly to begin with.

 

[bmoha7321]

I'd like to see more data

 

[snowborder714]

He posted links to the datalog from his AQ-1, along with the software to view it in post #115.

 

[eclipsegsx1736]

Woo hoo for data!!!! Thanks Beau!

What types of things did the instructor note that helped them make their decisions to bump you up the classes?

Sounds like you had a great weekend! I'm sure I'll have more to post after I get to check out the data.

Thanks Brian! I'd love to hear what you think of the data, the software, etc and if everything opens and displays correctly on your end. (PM if it gets a bit off topic).

As you can see from the picture his idea is of a German design from the BMW, 750 iL series I believe. I have seen Mercedes Benz start to do the same thing, here recently. It is way over engineered to begin with and restricts the airflow to the engine compartment. Ever worked on a BMW or Mercedez Benz? Never drop a tool/hardware because you will never find it. That's about what it is like to work on those basturds. Close quarters combat. Almost worse than a Jaguar....well almost.

Your best scenario is to redo your design and relocate it down lower. Modify that design and place it low as such as to "scoop" the air to a point inward and upward. Another words go with the flow in layman's terms. You want to somewhat mimic forced air induction, so redesign what you have and it will work just as good if not better. As others been telling you it is not a good location you have chosen, your restricting the principal reason as to why you have to have a radiator and radiator fan assembly to begin with.

Hm, I've never seen a BMW or Mercedes street car with anything like the vent I built. Not sure what you mean as far as over engineered either. Also, the car is quite easy to work on (duct comes out of the car in about 30 sec).

As far as mounting it lower, it's as low as it can go now without removing the lower rad support, and even doing so I'm not sure how much of an advantage that'd create. The design does "mimic forced air induction", given the fact that the inlet to the radiator is sealed off to the front bumper inlet, which is obviously one of the highest (if not highest) pressure zones on the whole car. Also, taking it another step further than that, the design of the lip on the hood aids to create a low pressure zone on the duct outlet, further assisting in airflow through the radiator.

As far as restricting the principal reason for a radiator and radiator fan, I think I've done just the opposite. A radiator is designed to extract radiant heat created by the combustion process. A radiator fan is designed to assist in generating airflow though the radiator whilst the car is at a slow speed or stopped. It is NOT designed to blow air over the engine bay. I've not had any issues with engine bay temperatures whatsoever, however I will most likely be adding some louvres to the hood to assist in extracting excessive engine bay heat mainly generated by the turbo and exhaust.

Beau

 

[Pipnorcali]

We need a dsm road race trip down to socal

 

[bmoha7321]

Hey Brian (snowborder714) I didn't mean data from the OP. I meant data to substantiate the post done by STARS. Personally I think the OP's design and the execution of it would be better to improve on. I don't see why it should be redone like STARS posted. That's just daft.
I grew up in SCCA racing. My stepdad raced low speed, road course & rally. He referred to rally as racing with big green cones that don't move (pine trees.) My stepdad also has 5 engineering degrees in different fields. Put himself thru mech engineering school as a mechanic. Won a bunch of events. So I got to see racing from a engineers and a mechanic/fabricator's (real world) viewpoint. Also as a co driver since I was little and light.
Anyway... I love this design. I think it's great.
I also went to school for mech engineering. Granted I did not finish. I have about a year and a half left.
I'm such a fan of our cars. It's amazing what these things are able to do. I work with all V8 mustang guys. And most of them think I'm outright lying about what our cars can do. I am personally responsible for one of my co workers selling his NA Mustang cobra and buying some crazy 800 hp turbo'd Cobra after my Talon ate his NA Cobra in an embarrassing fashion. I really enjoy people like the OP, Andrew Brilliant, JTMCinder, Greengoblin & tsiawd 666 pushing this platform past anyone's expectations.