FWIW, I owned Jensen Interceptors in both vented and unvented form (late vs. early) and the vents didn't do a whole lot of cooling but they did allow water into the engine bay to sit on top of the engine and cause rust etc. when it rained.
FWIW, I owned Jensen Interceptors in both vented and unvented form (late vs. early) and the vents didn't do a whole lot of cooling but they did allow water into the engine bay to sit on top of the engine and cause rust etc. when it rained.
Oh man, I'm so glad this article popped up on the page today. I was just dealing with heat on Sunday. Not much, mind you, but elevated levels. Enough to push the stock temperature needle up by a needle's width. It's time to get ahead of this before it becomes a problem, and I'm glad to hear that this helps!
wspohn said:FWIW, I owned Jensen Interceptors in both vented and unvented form (late vs. early) and the vents didn't do a whole lot of cooling but they did allow water into the engine bay to sit on top of the engine and cause rust etc. when it rained.
That would imply that the cooling problems were not related to airflow across the heat exchangers but were somewhere else.
Keith Tanner said:wspohn said:FWIW, I owned Jensen Interceptors in both vented and unvented form (late vs. early) and the vents didn't do a whole lot of cooling but they did allow water into the engine bay to sit on top of the engine and cause rust etc. when it rained.
That would imply that the cooling problems were not related to airflow across the heat exchangers but were somewhere else.
Yes - likely a big block Chrysler engine in a smallish engine bay that was already packed full of other things.
In reply to wspohn :
Or internal coolant routing problems, or air pockets in the heads, etc. I don't know how "off the shelf" the Intercepter engines were, but I do recall the Chevrolet engineers talking a lot about things like head design and cooling when the LS replaced the SBC. It's easier to keep a 500 hp LS3 cool than a 250 hp turbo Miata BP engine (which fundamentally dates back to the late 70s) because of those improvements.
This is interesting to me. I was watching a YouTube channel recently for an off-road recovery service and to keep their Jeep cool in the Utah heat they added a heater core with a fan blowing through it out of one of their hood vents. Always wondered if this would be effective on a race car.
Race cars have more air flowing over them, you shouldn't need the fan. But multiple heat exchangers work.
I did something similar to keep a classic Mini cool in high altitude desert conditions. Added a motorcycle radiator in the nose along with the stock one, as it sees almost no natural airflow. I also added a temperature triggered electric fan in the left front wheel well as that pulls through the rad. Minis are weird, the radiator is beside the engine because that's where the crank nose and thus fan are.
Yes adding an additional core is the sort-of equivalent to installing a larger radiator. The whole race cars manage without fans is also amplified by the size of radiators used for some pretty high power configurations. The 2002 Lola CART car radiator I have in the garage is about 24 inches wide by 14 inches tal by 2 inches thick. It supported 800+hp at Denver altitude. Granted we were running some pretty high water system pressures to give us some overhead on coolant temps before boiling.
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