How we’re going to keep our V6 MR2 properly lubricated

You’ll often hear oil referred to as the lifeblood of an engine. While this metaphor stretches things a bit, it is true that if you lose all of each fluid–or it gets hot to the point of chemical failure–bad things will happen.

We recommend avoiding both situations.

You’re on your own for the blood thing, but we have taken several steps to keep the oil in our 2GR-FE V6-powered Toyota MR2 happy.

[Our Toyota MR2 Turbo, now with 100% less turbo]

To do that, let’s trace the oil as it leaves the engine and flows into our supplemental measures before returning to the powerplant fully refreshed.

The oil exits the engine from this Wilhelm Raceworks adapter that bolts to the stock oil cooler exit.

In most 2GR-FE applications, this is simply a bypass, but in certain applications, like Siennas with tow packages, this provides oil flow to an engine coolant-regulated oil cooler.

In our application, we’ll use the Wilhelm adapter to attach a couple of -10AN hoses. This view is looking backward toward the back of the car, with your head directly under the back of the passenger seat. The line on your right is the exit from the engine, and the line on the left is the return.

Now we’ve turned 90 degrees and are standing directly under the center of the car, facing the passenger side.

The exit line we just saw is the one coming directly toward us. It takes a gentle 180-degree turn and heads up along the firewall.

The first stop is a supplemental manifold from Improved Racing.

This clever manifold is simply a pass-through with a -10 ORB inlet and outlet and two 1/8 NPT ports for installing sensors.

In our case, we’ll use one port for an oil temperature sensor and one for an oil pressure sensor. You’ll also see a third sensor in a single 1/8 NPT port on the outlet. That’s the trigger for our Derale oil cooler fans.

Now we’re on the passenger side of the car, looking up into the cubby where the intercooler used to reside inside the right-rear fender. It made a perfect spot for our Derale oil cooler and its dual fans.

At this point, we haven’t built any shrouding or ducting to the cooler from the opening in the side of the car, but those fans should pull plenty of air through the fins of the cooler regardless of channeling.

In the shot taken before the engine was installed, you can see how the 19-row Derale Hyper-Cool Dual tucks neatly away. completely out of the engine bay into the fender. We made a simple bracket for the bottom tabs and attached the top tabs directly to the wall of the engine bay.

The input is on the left–that’s the line coming from the Improved Racing manifold–and the outlet is on the right.

Following the exit line from the oil cooler, it heads back toward the firewall where it hits this Y-connection.

The inlet from the cooler is the lower of the two insulated lines, and the line heading directly toward the camera is the return to the engine–the one that will contain cool oil.

The upper insulated line leaving the top of the Y goes…

…up and over the passenger-side engine mount to a grommeted hole connecting to the rear trunk, where it meets…

…a Moroso oil accumulator.

We attached the brackets to the trunk floor with nutserts and bolted the 3-quart accumulator in place.

An oil accumulator works similarly to one of those pressure tanks you might find on an irrigation or drinking water system–assuming it’s one that gets water from a well.

In our case, a pressurized chamber inside the cylinder pushes on 3 quarts of stored oil. When the prevailing pressure of the oil system drops below the pressure in the chamber, it pushes that stored oil into the system to maintain total system pressure.

A manual shutoff valve comes preinstalled, and we also added an electric solenoid valve so we don’t have to manually activate the shutoff. We mounted the solenoid on a small piece of high-density foam to give it some vibration isolation.

The final piece of our outside-the-engine oil control strategy is a Moroso air-oil separator.

This will take blowby from the valve cover. A line will run back to the intake manifold to relieve pressure, and the drain line will be plumbed directly back into the oil pan.

2GR-FE engines are known for blowing a bit of oil out of the top of the engine in extreme-use cases, so we want a path for that oil to be easily recycled back into the crankcase and not constantly filling the air/oil separator catch can.

We previously took precautions inside the engine to keep our oil pickup wet and keep pressure up, but when it comes to lubrication, overkill is never a bad idea.

You also might notice that we chose not to run an oil thermostat in our system. Well, we have one, and it fits, but at this time, we’re leaving it out until we get some initial temperature data on track once the car is running.

Our rationale there is since this will be primarily a track car, its primary use is going to be pretty hard. It’s not going to see any street time, so it’s always going to be operating in a mode where it’s going to produce sufficient stress on the oil to bring it to temperature.

Also, that’s fewer hose connections and fewer complications, and simplicity always seems to be a solid plan.

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