Overheating? Tips to Make Your Car Run Cooler!

overheating is a big problem for a lot of cars especially if you drive on the track but um I'm going to show you how to make that a nonissue so almost everything overheats especially um in track driving conditions but let's start with the basics first if you have like a naturally aspirated um car and you do track days and it's bone stock uh you could probably get away with just doing some good maintenance and uh having some good basic parts some of that is having good coolant and uh bleeding the system really well um we use uh Redline super cool coolant we've done extensive testing with this on the dyno and on the track and it really does work I mean cars run between 10 and 20° cooler and sometimes like only 5° but uh you know it makes a pretty big difference for just a coolant change now if you're running in like a race car or your track Aid group doesn't allow you to run coolant on the track uh which is actually fairly pretty common uh we recommend running straight up water with some Redline water wet the water wetter is a surfactant that helps the water work better and exchange heat generally a car will run 5 to 10° cooler with this it also has uh corrosion Inhibitors and uh lubricants for the water pump and the seals and stuff your cooling system is kind of like a battery so sometimes you have dissimilar Metals uh in a solution which is the coolant so the most important thing is to have something like water watera in there to uh deactivate that so your system doesn't corrode up now even even if you have an all aluminum engine you still get electrolysis and you could have uh electrolysis going on between your Blockhead and your stainless ml last head gasket for instance So to avoid that uh you want to use this stuff and never run straight water um one thing if you're running this on your street car it's not going to last as long as coolant so you have to maintain your system a lot more same with your race car uh like race cars get parked and you forget about the cooling system and you might have this in your cooling system for years but don't forget you got to do maintenance you got to replenish this kind of all the time keep all the electrolysis at Bay and keep from you from having head gasket problems uh like particularly engines that have a lot of problems with this electrolysis it's when you have an aluminum head with an iron block the Alum aluminum acts like a sacrificial anode and gets all messed up also if you have an iron block with aluminum components like a water pump or radiator electrolysis is an issue so good coolant and uh water watera really helps uh the other thing is you want to really bleed your cooling system really well uh a lot of people mess this up especially on late model cars a lot of the new cars have really low aerodynamic noses so the radiator is low it's hard to get all the air out of those suckers so one of the best things is to use one of these bleeder funnels these bleeder funnels go on top of your uh filler and they give you you know like several more inches of uh head space to uh bleed the system better so uh if your radiator is almost lower than the engine this will get your radiator fill point above the engine and it'll help you get all the air out so one of the things you do is uh make sure your heater is on get all the air out of the heater core uh fill everything up with coolant start it up uh and then watch the bubbles come out of this guy and and then uh you want to probably hold the engine at about uh between 2 and 3,000 RPM till everything's fully warm heaters blowing hot air and your thermostat is open uh this will get um most of the bubbles out certain cars that have very low radiators uh could still be stubborn so you might have to do all all of that plus Jack the front of the car up or if it's a mid engine or rear engine car jack the rear up to get that filler high and to get all the air out of the system but air in the system is often the big big trouble and this goes a way to fix it get these at eBay or Amazon for like 10 bucks or something so it's money well spent the other thing you can do is increase your coolant pressure when you increase the pressure of a fluid the boiling point goes up so uh if you increase your coolant pressure with a high pressure cap uh generally it's it's like 25 lbs or less like some of the racing caps are 25 lb uh this one is about 18 lbs stock is generally like 12 or something uh you do this the boiling point goes up you have less localized boiling inside your engine particularly around the combustion chamber in your cylinder head uh localized boiling and the bubbles are kind of like an insulation and they reduce the heat transfer into the coolant and your engine gets hotter and it detonates and mes messes up so uh high pressure cap helps relieve some of that problem now some of the bad things about a high-pressure cap is it puts more stress on your hoses and things like that so you have to make sure your hoses are in really good shape if you have a car that's a popular performance car uh you can get uh heavyduty silicone hoses now there's a lot of Cheapo silicone hoses like me in China and stuff on the market made out of colored who knows what try to avoid avoid those we like to use Samco or HPS um in particular uh I like HPS because um it's four Plies and it's polyester polyester has good tensil strength um so minimum four Plies for your Silicone hose good brand like HPS or uh Samco avoid the super cheap Chinese stuff and you also have to make sure you change or every single hose is in good condition in your vehicle even like heater hoses and little bypass hoses cuz all of these can cause leaks and cause trouble on the track or in Daily driving now if they don't make special high performance hoses for your particular car uh I prefer to use uh brand new OEM hoses um straight from the dealer genuine parts these are C ly better quality than uh the aftermarket replacement hoses you get at AutoZone uh another thing that's often overlooked is the quality of the hose clamps um like I can really uh stress that hose clamps make a huge difference and uh I recommend Norma clamps so these are made in Sweden or something but in testing these clamps can hold twice as much pressure before they slip off or uh let the hose in uh blow off any coupling uh a lot of it is like really high quality um worm gear in in here um if you notice the uh the teeth don't go all the way through it's kind of like an embossment and the uh edges are rolled so they don't cut into your hose when you make them super tight but uh if you have a problem blowing off hoses or uh let's say your charge pipe on your turbos blow off normal clamps are going to solve that they're they're probably three times more expensive than your autoone Cheapo clamps but believe me they're worth every panty um some of the other things is you want to make sure all your belts are in great shape before you go on the track now um some popular performance cars uh have like heavy duty racing belts like uh these uh these are from enjuku racing uh they're Kevlar reinforced and they're designed for the stresses of racing now if you can't get uh racing uh belts that are uh you know like really strong I really recommend um OEM belts straight from the dealer these are generally the best quality belts and they're better than what you get at aone and all that most of the time this kind of stuff will uh help prevent you from overheating on the track if you have a regular naturally aspirated car uh one of the things though is if you have a turbocharged car generally you're going to have problems if you're a good driver on the track like if you're running that thing for everything it's got and uh it's a hot day like in Southern California like where the tracks are they're usually out in the desert and you know we run when it's 100° or even 110 or 15 sometimes and inadvertently just about every turbocharged car is going to have an overheating problem obiously the first thing you want to change is the uh radiator this is a COO racing radiator um it's uh has some some things that we really like about cooo first off it's a direct drop in um this one happens to be for an s13 but uh coyo has a wide application range and they make it for just about any performance car some of the features obviously like the core is a is a lot thicker uh thicker core more area for heat exchange um more importantly uh coyo pays attention to a feature that a lot of radiator companies don't pay attention to a lot of radiator companies try to get the maximum U amount of tubes and the most dense uh pitch in there but Coo's found in their uh research that if you don't allow the air to penetrate the core because you're pitch is too high and you have too many tubes uh the um the cord doesn't exchange heat so well so coyo has about what they figured is the uh optimal fin pitch so the air will penetrate through the radiator now um we also like to run CSF radiators um they have a whole different type of fin design where um the fins are super wide now one of the reasons why you want to run uh something like a COO is um over like I know there's eBay aluminum racing radiators there the coyo although it might look almost the same has some features like turbulators inside the tubes uh turbulator is a little um thin sheet metal W kind of thing that helps conduct heat from the coolant to the outside of the tube where can be exchanged in the air your typical super Cheapo radiator just has like a tube and the turbulators um probably almost double the efficiency uh another thing is the coyo has nice TIG welds uh a lot of factory radiators have a uh crimon plastic cap um with an O-ring like if you run a high press radiator cap or it gets just a little bit old the O-ring blows out and you have a pressure coolant leak and you overheat but uh the Coo's TIG welded one piece uh can take a lot of pressure without blowing the other thing is the coyo is a total drop in it'll drop right into your car and fit perfect so first thing to consider in your high- powerered turbo car is a uh Performance Radiator the next thing about your turbo car is uh they usually have oil coolers but it's usually totally inadequate for um track driving so it's important that you get a uh sufficient ly sized uh oil cooler now this is a coil oil cooler 25 row uh this is probably good for like a pretty hot four cylinder you know like if you have a bigger engine and you're putting out like maybe more than 400 horsepower you probably need a bigger cooler than this but I don't know this thing's about three times bigger than your typical stock oil cooler next is a uh oil filter adapter thermostat so uh you don't want to skimp here and you don't want to get eBay junk uh we've tried cheaper ones and they don't really work too well this is a gry unit it has a thermostatic valve if you're doing a pure race car you can probably just forget the thermostat but most of our cars uh we drive them on the street and we drive them on the tracks so you want to have the thermostat you don't want to overcool the oil if you seen my video on why e E85 sucks you can see that consequences of not bringing everything up to temperature so uh you know keep your oil um at a decent stable temperature with a thermostat if if the car is driven on the street use high quality stuff like uh this grety part also don't skip on your lines use quality a in fittings and quality uh braided hose um you know not Chinese junk but something good like uh AO equip or Earls um you know this is your engine's oil going through there and you don't want to take any chances another thing to remember is you want to avoid using 90° fittings on your oil system a 90° fitting can cut down the flow and and of your oil by about uh you know 40% so always try to try to Plum things with straight or you know just slight bends in your uh fittings an important thing to remember now another thing that is really critical in a car that tends to run hot is you want to have a surge tank um or a swirl plot uh you know we used to have to fabricate our own but uh GK Tech has this neat one uh this is for like an SR20 but it's a total Bolton um I didn't have all the fittings out here and the hoses but it comes with all the hoses and fittings and everything you need to drop right into your Sr you know they also have it for uh just about any of the popular Japanese cars but what a surge tank or a swirl pot does is it gives you a really high bleed point you can put this as high as it'll go under the hood and instead of your radiator Inlet you have an extra high bleed point you can use one of these funnels and get it even higher um this helps ensure that all the bubbles are removed from your cooling system what they also do too is they continually circulate coolant uh through the tank so um you can have a couple of bleed points like at the high part of your radiator and even your cylinder head or your uh heater Loop and whenever there's a bubble it'll go into the surge tank and get eliminated and solid coolant comes out the bottom so it'll continually Purge your system of any accumulated bubbles uh these things actually make a pretty huge difference um in keeping things cool uh especially on the track or doing drifting or where your engine gets really hot so just about any car that's going to see serious track use uh I always put in the surge tank or a swirl pot also a problem that many cars have is a water pump cavitation now you look at your typical water pump the impeller is like a stamped piece of Steel and it looks like a an egg beater or something not too many water pumps have a proper curv vein impeller so when you have the stamped steel thing with a lot of sharp edges and it's not shaped for you know pumping efficiency generally at high RPMs it'll be like uh it'll start to like uh cause the water to foam around the impeller and the pumping efficiency goes way down now some cars are notorious are doing this like a Nissan SR20 for instance so short of making a custom impeller which is pretty expensive and requires a lot of research uh you can underdrive your water pump now like we found the SR20 the water pump cavitates at 6,500 RPM and that's bad news on the motor that red lines at 7700 so SRS are known to like reach a certain point and they instantly overheat no matter what you do so we have an ATI super damper and uh besides uh you know damping the torsional vibrations of your crank better this also underd drives the uh your accessories and most importantly your water pump this saves a little bit of power from uh underd driving your accessories and slows down the pump now we also got this water pump pulley from enjuku Racing for the SR so it's bigger and this is the stock one this also slows down the water pump so you know between the two we could probably spin up to like eight grand before the water pump starts to cavitate some cars are notorious for this um you know if your car gets sudden overheating no matter what you're doing uh there's a chance your water pump's cavitating especially if it has a stamped steel impeller so you might want to look at underd driving your pump now what temperatures do you have to worry about before you start harming your engine irreparably and my personal opinion from a lot of racing and wrecking a lot of stuff over the years uh you don't want to have your coolant temperature exceed 230° now that's kind of conservative like it can go a little higher like your engine's not going to instantly explode at 231 but you want to like back off at about 230 also you don't want your oil temperature to exceed 250° now if that seems kind of low this is the reason generally bearings are made out of soft Metals with uh low melting points like lead Le and uh lead with Alloys or Tri metal lead or something but it's still lead and it still has a fairly low melting point so you don't want to get the lead to where it's starting to get mushy for a lack of better better words and uh lose its loadbearing capacity you know like I found that 250 is a perfectly safe number to try to limit the engine to uh also if you're running OEM bearings uh OEM bearings there's been a big Push by the manufacturers to eliminate lead from bearing material so they put a lot of uh aluminum and you know like other stuff these things are greatly affected by heat and uh they're affected by heat more than the tri metal racing bearings so you want to keep the temperature below 250 keep your bearings happy so you don't spin bearings finally you want to um make sure that your air flow to your heat exchangers is uh sealed to the front of the car or whatever cooling opening a lot of your stock radiators have a foam weather strip around it when you put your racing radiator in you want to make sure that foam weather strip is intact like air will find its way around uh things if it can cuz like air is lazy and it doesn't want to go through here so if you have any gaps the air will go around your around your coolers so when you look at uh cars like a this time attack car you'll see there's baffling and uh you know the basically the heat exchangers are sealed to the front of the car so every bit of air that comes through the front openings goes through the coolers um you know some cars have like um cooling plates that that you can buy but uh if they don't make them for your car they're easy to make just use cardboard as a template and cut them out of uh sheet metal or plastic or something and then uh figure out some way to catch them it's not not too hard makes a huge difference so these are the tips to prevent from overheating um it totally applies to any car driven on the track and it really helps on your street car so I hope this helps you I know it's helped me i' I've learned these tricks the hard way over over the years many years of driving at the track and messing stuff up so learn from my mistakes so if you like this content be sure to subscribe subribe to our Channel um if you need parts to your car uh we have a uh online store at Moto iq.com if you want a cool shirt like me uh we have a merch we we have like a several different designs if you want us to build your engine or work on your car uh go to moto iq.com and look at our garage Services link uh fill out the form and we'll get back to you um so I hope I see you at the track I hope to see you doing a lot of hot laps and not staying on the side bum cuz your engine fried or you can't drive because it's too hot talk to you next time

Channel: MotoIQ

Views: 68,456

Keywords: motoiq

Id: FLHfjy94vM0

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023