I'm sure they have. But last time they found a flaw, they added limp mode.

I just think the ability to keep revving at 6k after hitting 280 will allow people to go beyond the point of no return.

I did not read this whole marathon post, is limp-mode gone!? That's a no-no on ANY street going vehicle...

no, we have no details.

But limp mode limits to 5500 or so at 280, and doesn't limit to 3k until 300. dropping that kinda temp is gonna take a while.

Well, now that the radiator is providing flow to the oil path, it won't take forever. I can shed roughly 1-2* every 5-10 seconds at 200*F oil temps just by taking the car out of gear at 70mph and letting it coast a touch. Of course, the cooling systems are pretty different based on that picture. I don't know, I'm sure Nissan did their homework, noone likes replacing engines.

I'm really liking what the 370Z has evolved into, now if they go with DI and get that bhp up to 370-380, I'm sold.

i don't think you understand the changes that happen when the system winds up heatsoaked.

DI would be nice. If they pushed the power that high, I'd swap the subaru for another one.

Maybe not, but I have never had a problem cooling a car off before that got the oil temps into the mid 200's. Then again, it wasn't a 370Z, either, so I digress. Time will tell when people take these and track them and report back. I'm hoping!

Yep, I think the 370Z would make a GREAT! 400bhp car with the addition of a bit wider tire out back, 395's would suffice nicely.

I'm wanting a 370Z and the extra $500 in my wallet every month, but 500+bhp is intoxicating. I'll get tired of it, though, and trade in a while. For now...:driving:

i don't think the Z's rad can dissipate much more than 80kJ, you're going to be pushing more than that when the oil is up at 280 and the coolant is heated accordingly.

hopefully the cooling system will prevent it from getting to that point...it's entirely possible that won't be a problem unless you are absolutely railing the car. I do know that if you get there, you are in trouble though.

Time will tell. If it works decent, I am torn on waiting for the new platform or getting the 370. I have looked at all the other cars in the price-point I want to be at, and the 370Z is the one I want in that price range. I doubt the C7 will be selling for shy of $50K for a long time.

still waiting to hear back from Z1. hopefully they can give us actual heat dissipation numbers for the rad...nissan won't release them. it will be pretty easy to see where the tipping point is once we know what it can push, with just a ballpark on the o:w: cooler transfer.

Of course, if it becomes an issue, radiator replacements are easy, and air coolers are still available as a proven solution.

Rather than some "book number", I think if someone were to take the car to Spring Mountain in NV and flog the piss out of it on a 100* day and tell us how it went, that would be worth a lot more.

Why? If it requires a lot of fabrication and custom work you'd be better off going with an oil to air cooler instead, not to mention the better cooling effect anyway.

too many variables there. though that data would be useful for understanding how fast it heated up.

:iagree:

Not following your logic. The oil isn't generating heat by itself. It's getting heated by the engine. So if you cool the oil, you are helping to cool the engine. Also lets assume the oil reaches 280 fahrenheit (no idea what that is. I'm part of the 95% of the human population that uses metric units). That means the engine is already at 280 or even higher. So the coolant will already have to deal with that, regardless of whether or not it's also dealing with the oil.

Besides, given the huge difference in specific heat capacity between oil and water, and the fact that the volumes of both oil and coolant interacting in the cooler are so small, it's unlikely that there will be any huge change in coolant temperature.

What I'm really concerned about is whether that system will even be adequate at all to cool the oil. 99.99% of the problems with limp mode are due to sustained and aggressive track driving. Will that small and cheap cooler really be enough to prevent that from happening? If it doesn't then people will be hitting limp mode again and it will be the same complaints over and over again, and the same magazine articles bashing the Z again and again. Sure, the Z might last until lap 4 or 5 before shutting down, instead of lap 2 or 3, but still it's more of the same.

mags won't be hitting limp mode in their testing, that's almost guaranteed.

when you are heating the coolant at both ends, you run into issues. trust me. i've run into this issue before. the tipping point on the last car I ran with this setup was about 270.

or about 130C...or about 400K...whichever is to your liking.

What about track rats? Would it be possible to do a 20-30 min hard lapping session without overheating the oil using this OEM cooler? If not, then we're back where we started 3 years ago, and the Z would still require an aftermarket oil cooler to be track worthy.

And what do you mean by heating the coolant "at both ends"? Is the oil cooler supplied by coolant flowing from the radiator to the engine or the engine to the radiator? Why would it cause a problem anyway? Look at the size of the hose going into that cooler. It's much smaller than the radiator hose. That means only a very small volume of coolant is flowing into that oil cooler. It doesn't seem likely to significantly affect the cooling system that much.

it remains to be seen how flow is set up. I guess we will find out.

Anyone who is doing serious tracking will want a better oil cooling system anyway. That would be like trying to do serious tracking on the stock brake pads.

also, pharmacist, remember we could now swap the radiator instead of adding an air cooled system and probably get more from the car...

at this point, no real purpose in borrowing trouble from the future. I'm sure someone will find out where the limits are, and we can cross that bridge when we get there.

:argue: Of course you know this means war!! :drama::inoutroflpuke:

^check your usercp :icon17:

Can I haz some soda with that popcorn?

:happydance:

You want grape or what?:bowrofl:

Nah get me a Pepsi. :tup:

:stirthepot:

I thought i was following you around all day.:eekdance:

:icon17:

350z's had basically the same oil cooler in them, and they decided to not give it to the 370z.

Very odd because Nissan had to know the oil temps got hotter than they should while developing the car.

350z's also didnt have an oil temperature gauge to my knowledge...

So its like Nissan said .... lets spend the money on an oil temperature gauge (so people can not let there oil get too hot), but we'll do that with the money we saved from removing the $30 oil cooler....

not sure why the vq37 runs oil hotter than the 35de or 35hr other than the lack of that oc they now added...

I will wait for the future reports.

I speculate that this O/C will work fine in traffic, but still require more when pushed.

Now I await the answer.

actually it's the vvel. The swinging lever arms on top of the valves that go back and forth generate a lot of friction and heat. That's why the vq37 generates proportionately more heat than many other engines, and that's part of the reason why nissan uses diamond like coating and nano particles in ester oil, to try and reduce the friction.

That's kinda my point actually. That this oil cooler may just be a mere PR stunt to appease the magazine critics. The Z really doesn't have an oil temp problem on the road. Just on the track, most of the time at least. So if the oil cooler doesn't solve the overheating during prolonged track driving and the owner still has to get an aftermarket kit anyway, then what's the point of this cooler?

Funny that you mentioned brake pads since they too have a similar problem. Stock pads are more than good enough on the street but caused lots of problems on the track, including car and driver crashing a nismo. So in response nissan developed nismo pads that supposedly were better able to handle heat and brake fade. Only it turned out that these overpriced pads were a marginal improvement over the oem pad at best, and owners still had to get aftermarket pads for the track anyway.

But I agree with red zed however. Lets not put the cart before the horse. Lets wait until someone gets one of these 2012 cars and actually flogs them on a track. Who knows? Maybe that tiny oil to water cooler will actually perform admirably and i'll be forced to eat my words. :ugh2:

Did the 350 have this style cooler? I couldn't remember for sure...haven't looked at one in quite a while.

Because I know the 350 was prone to pretty high temps on the track as well....though not as severe as the 370.

I don't think 350 had a limp mode. I am betting that they will have the same problem. I have a 25R and I can barely do 20 min without having to do a slight cool down every now and then.

I know it did not have a limp mode, but guys like Scott saw 300* temps...might just be because he runs harder than most.

I don't think any street able solution will be great for hard, extended runs, but 15 minutes with a decent driver would be nice.

Not actually true...Nanoparticles don't even play a role here, chemistry and some physics; it's chemical compatibility between the coating and an additive in the oil. Nissan's engineers and tribologists who worked on their Hydrogen free DLC coating used in the VQ37 and its relationship with the "ester oil" published their research. I do not have the rights to redistribute specifically what their findings were, but they have been widely recognized for their success reducing valvetrain friction. In fact, they were able to achieve friction levels in the "superlow" regime (coefficient of friction <0.01) at the boundary condition...on par with the rolling contact friction level of needle roller bearings.

This is of course, assuming the engine is being run with the recommended ester oil. Other oils can (and do) still perform well in this engine, but the "magic" doesn't happen unless the specially matched oil is used. Use whatever oil you want, you won't be harming your engine either way, but it was designed to use the ester oil (which in turn was designed by Nissan to be used specifically in engines using a H-Free DLC...yes, they did actually engineer this oil blend, can't say who manufactures it). The benefits of the ester oil aren't necessarily capturable in the traditional UOA, and it's also not a super-long service life blend either so it's not surprising to be at all that the oil doesn't perform spectacularly in UOA. The nerd in me says to use the ester oil, but change it more frequently you would your typical high-performance synthetic.

There's countless threads here and elsewhere filled with misinformation about how their ester oil and VVEL work (or don't work), as someone who has thoroughly read (and has the education to understand) their research (before I even bought a 370Z), what Nissan's accomplished is quite impressive on a scientific level, let alone commercializing the technology and applying it to production internal combustion engine.

Ok, end rant...sorry for getting off topic, back to the oil cooler!

While it is impressive on a scientific level, it's not really shown to help in the real world.

It's more of a great lesson in project management. Here's what happens when you give a bunch of engineers a budget and very little control....you get super cool oil that doesn't work.

Having logged and monitored my oil and water temps in the past, it seems like our water temps have a lot more headroom than our oil temps do in most conditions. In other words, it's always seemed that the radiator had more cooling capacity left on the table, and the problem was just that there's not much that can do to help the oil temps (since the only xfer between the two is through the engine block).

The oil:air coolers we've been adding to the cars directly cool the oil at the expense of cutting into the cold airflow budget of the radiator, and still the radiator system copes fine on temps (at least in part because keeping the oil cooler reduces the load on the system in general). Any sort of oil:water interface is only going to increase the thermal coupling between the two bringing them more into balance and keeping everything cooler.

The small unit at the filter may not be "enough" cooling to track without additional oil cooling (because it doesn't look big enough to transfer enough heat between the two), but I definitely think it will help, and that it will reduce the size requirements for any additional oil:air cooling needed while also removing some of the warmup problems we have today with just oil:air.

Getting your oil to 280 is going to cause problems regardless, and the point of this is to make that less likely than before, not to make 280F oil temps sustainable or tolerable.

The big real-world data point in favor of this system is AM Performance's track system. They're using a slightly larger and better-designed oil:water interface, on a slightly better radiator, and running in long hard real race conditions without additional oil:air cooling.