Recommendations for improving cooling stack
 

Good day all,
Since having moved to intermediate rungroup in my last HPDEs (20min runs on a fast circuit), I have reached the capacity of my cooling stack on warm days, with my engine oil temps going up to about 259F and water temps up to 232F, using the Jackson Racing dual radiator/water to oil cooler and Redline 40WT race oil. The car has a gt2871 turbo with built engine with forged 10 comp ratio pistons, making about 400hp at the crank, 300whp. My goal is to bring my temps down to get some headroom and minimize risk of reliability issues on the engine.

I’m looking at adding ducting in the front and possibly opening up the front to improve airflow, and looking likely at adding an air to oil cooler to replace oil cooler section of the JR water 2 air cooler, but since I am using it in winter as daily, I was wondering if anyone had successes using both a W2O and A2O cooler in serial. I understand the trade offs on pressure and having more failure points, but since I already have the JR dual cooler, I was wondering if this could make sense as an option or not and particularly if anyone had experience with such a setup. Possibly a smaller a2o would work. I do about 5 hpde days per year in the intermediate run group (2hrs of track time a day) and otherwise use the car as year round daily driver.

Thanks in advance for the feedback

What are you doing currently to vent air OUT of the engine bay? Your engine bay is like a sealed water reservoir - if you're not letting water out, you can't really put more in without an outlet.

I recently put Verus hood vents on my turbo FRS. this car also sees rain and snow. I immediately wish I had bought a different hood after realizing the Verus vents (even the guards) dump water straight onto my turbo. Buy a junk hood and get vents for it. Swapping the hood (even alone) only takes a few minutes and is totally worth the benefit

+1 for hood vents.

Actually I have the four Verus Eng hood louvers as well. It did help, essentially offsetting a bit the added heat as my driving improved. I don’t use the rain guards during hpdes but put them back after. Same as you the water dumps right onto the turbo blanket… I’ve been looking for a second hood but they are very hard to find, so currently when they call for big rain I put an aluminum sunshade under the hood so that the water falls where the hood clam & rad is. Better than nothing! The other thing I’m considering is moving to redline 50WT for the summer…

What's your intercooler setup look like?

The turbo Intercooler takes most of the front in terms on width, and height of the open grill. See image.

Which way does the piping go?

You will always get better performance from dedicated components. I would ditch the dual rad setup. This will let you place the oil cooler in a different location like fender well or fog light area. Freeing up more ambient airflow to be used specifically to cool the radiator.

Looking more closely at the pic of the FMIC, are there a lot of bent fins? Some are OK, but a lot can be problematic. The GT3 guys typically replace the side rads seasonally as they are totally exposed with zero protection. As the number of bent fins increases, the cooling capacity drops :(

Also, any way to get a FMIC with the end tanks further apart? End tanks exposed to the ambient airflow are going to restrict airflow more than you think.

As others have said, hood vents can be effective (break out some yarn to know for sure). I've found on the WRX/STi models, a vent ~6" behind the radiator provides a very measurable bump in cooling capacity at speed.

Adding a splitter can add a marginal cooling improvement (and stability), but more so at very high speeds.

Yes there are a good number of bent fins on the intercooler. I’ll look to see if I can Straighten them or need to look for a replacement, in which case maybe a differently shaped IC can maybe help... Here are some pics of the routed piping which hopefully will explain it better than words, also showing the hood vents (currently with the rainguards on, but I do take them off in the summer)

Tape a piece of yarn at the front and back of each strip of vent and go down the highway. You want to see the yarn up. If it goes into the vent, they are making things worse, not better.

Straightening fins sucks, but it only costs you time so little to lose there.

Is there only 1 radiator fan? The intake is throwing me off, but it looks like only one.

As for the verus vents. I extended all 4 something like this photo for daily use. Keeps the water well away and I remove them at the track.

Thanks I’ll give it a try and see the results. Yes there are 2 rad fans (the stock ones)

That’s a very smart idea, and pretty much what I need for daily driving outside hpdes. I’ll look to find a way to do something similar. So did you just attached them with metal screws, or riveted them ? thanks!