Hot Air Intake
With the install of the Pure Turbos Hybrid an air intake solution was required. APR had already released their turbo inlet and carbon fiber tube which connected to the stock air box. They haven't released their filter at the time of this writing after teasing it 6 months ago so it required designing your own solutions. More on that later.
First to get more air in, I started with cutting my air box open to allow more air flow and putting in a K&N Filter. You can find that filter here. That showed gains of 21-25 wheel horsepower. Quite a bit from a simple modification. As you can see, these are in the bottom of the box and can't be seen when the box is placed in the engine bay.
For the half mile event with Shift S3ctor I was at at the end of April I ran this setup put on by Pure Turbos. They fabricated a tube as seen below. That tube can be found at the following link. The two ends need to be cut evenly to meet the length requirements. I ran 173 miles per hour in the half mile with that tube and cone filter from K&N. You can find that filter at the following link.
After the Shift S3ctor event my dad found another tube which was still a 4 inch tube and fabricated the intake to look like what is shown below. He found a tube from CX Racing which has a 45 degree angle bend on it then cut the ends off to the right length. Then after he took it down to a powder coat place to get it powder coated black. They used a crinkle finish on it to make it look and feel like the manifold. Now it matches the factory in style, form, and function. Take a look at the pictures below.
APR has stated they will be releasing their new cone intake and announced it back in December. I really liked their idea of a carbon fiber tube to match my carbon tube going to the turbo inlet. I was getting ready for Shift S3ctor and contacted them to ask them if I could get a prototype. I needed just more airflow and since they had announced it, I offered to test it for them on a Pure Turbos hybrid setup. They weren't ready to release it and so it required fabrication of our own. I don't regret doing that and am super pleased with how this turned out and now won't buy an APR version when it eventually comes out.
I know this is called a "hot air" intake. I'd like to test it against others in the industry. "Cold air" setups that I've seen on the market won't allow for this much volume. I understand they pull air from the front but the intake at the front is small in comparison. This is in the engine bay but at speed, the air from the engine bay will evacuate quickly. Even the little 2.5 liter engine spinning at 7500 rpms will suck in a lot of air every second and there isn't that much air in the engine bay. Because of the quick air exchange I would like to see how much difference there is in temperatures entering the intake itself. In addition this car is turbocharged. On a naturally aspirated car I can see more importance in using a cold air intake. I believe that the turbocharger will heat up the air much more than a difference from the outside air versus the inside air. I know the point has been made of compression and its compounding affects. I understand that concept but I would like to see empirical data to demonstrate it. I found some excellent discussions on "hot air intakes" here and here. Gale Banks used a naturally aspirated engine to demonstrate the difference. I'd love to see the difference on a turbocharged engine. I need one of those Banks data loggers. As you can see below this made a maximum horsepower of 653@7,000 rpm's. I'm willing to use my car as a test if others have some cold air intakes they want to arrange a dyno and a time to do it.
Thanks for visiting and remember to "Strive to Arrive".
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |