Quote:
Originally Posted by 1slow370
air to water inter-cooling is used for packaging in a roots setup, and for drag racing only where there is an ice chest and it is used to achieve sub ambient air charge temperatures, in every other way air to air is superior, including in fail safe ability if you get a hole in your air to air inter-cooler you have a boost leak, if you get a hole in your stillen water cooler you have a blown engine, if you have a water leak in your system your inter-cooler is effectively gone and the charge temps and detonation will go up. It would be nice to hear your reasoning for keep an air to water cooler, heat soak resistance? you know your kit heat soaks in half a session on a track right?
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Air to water intercoolers aren't limited to roots superchargers or drag racing vehicles exclusively. They are definitely more prominent in those applications but to say that those are the only applications utilizing air to water intercooler systems is incorrect.
Vortech uses air to water intercoolers on the following applications:
2006-2010 Jeep SRT8
2005-2010 Chrysler/Dodge 5.7L Hemi Systems
2005-2010 Chrysler/Dodge 6.1L Hemi Systems
Various Mustang applications
NISSAN built the 370Z to be a great sports car, and they did just that. I love driving our 370Z every chance I get. However, they did not build a race car. As such these cars, along with almost every other production car in the world, experience issues when being pushed hard on a race track:
Engine oil temperature
Power steering fluid temperature
Brake overheating
Differential overheating/failure
In all of our marketing and all of our conversations regarding our kit we made it very clear that our goal was CARB legality and street performance. Our goal has never been to build a race car. Just like NISSAN wasn't building a race car, neither were we.
Heat is obviously an issue on the 370Z, this is something we can all agree on. The oil wants a large cooler, the power steering needs a large cooler, and in the case of an automatic transmission the transmission wants a large cooler. On a roots supercharger you're primarily concerned about the packaging of the blower to the intake manifold and the necessary cooler. However, when engineering a supercharger system one must look at the total vehicle package. If I put this here, what happens to that. So if I install oil coolers, power steering coolers, and transmission coolers (in the case of an automatic transmission) in front of my radiator what happens to my radiator performance? Then if I cover all of the coolers with an intercooler, what happens to my various other coolers? All of this needs to be taken into consideration.
Let's be realistic about air to air intercoolers as well. The efficiency of the intercooler is reliant on ambient air temperatures. The air to air intercooler must be mounted in a location where it will receive direct airflow. Additionally, the air to air intercooler has to be very large in order to allow for sufficient internal airflow to not impact intercooler efficiency. This will impact various other systems of the vehicle.
Should we decide to offer a kit intended for race cars we will do extensive testing on race courses. I'm pretty sure we know a driver that can put a car through its paces...