[agentorange]

So it's been damned hot here this week and I have noticed a distinct drop off in low end grunt compared to milder temps. By hot I mean officially 108°F (42°C for my metric viewers) in the afternoon. What the temperature might be for the air hanging over the sunbaked freeway I shudder to think. Oh, we have a forecast showing three solid days of 112°F coming up. Yippee.

My immediate thought was that maybe I need a bigger intercooler. However, checking some threads on the subject I found that increased lag was a problem with larger intercoolers. I was a bit shocked by the increased weight, too. Are the stock fixing up to trebling the weight?

BTW, my car is totally stock and likely to stay that way due to the local smog inspection rules.

All advice gratefully received.

[andreigbs]

Heat soak is just part and parcel of intercooled turbo intake setup. Not much you can do about it, except look into some type of water/meth injection or figure out a way to increase air flow and heat dissipation.

I had an idea at one time of wrapping copper tubing with liquid in it around the A/C condenser and running it to the intercooler where it would wrap around again, forming a circuit basically. I never got around to testing it out.

[Enabled]

I don't think it's worth potentially increasing lag for a few days or weeks of heat out of the year... especially on a stock car. A larger intercooler cooling low boost air at 108 deg will be the same as a stock intercooler cooling low boost at 108 deg.

This would be similar to living in a high altitude environment with less atmospheric pressure.

[agentorange]

Thanks, folks. I'd kind of come to much the same conclusions already, but I thought I would post my question in case I had missed something obvious, lol.

[Onizukachan]

A couple decades ago I had the same thought on my DSM with side mount intercooler.

except my idea was to spray the IC externally with water, using an extra washer nozzle. Ultimately I also decided it wasn’t worth the extra effort, expense, or cleaning.

[Soul_Glo]

You could look into a water-meth set-up.
It shouldn't cost more than $500 I'd imagine.

High quality reading material to learn more:


https://www.dieselarmy.com/engine-te...nol-injection/

At least this is something you can turn on/off whereas the intercooler is always in use. It's totally reversible too and requires no mapping although you could remap if you're hitting Pike's Peak.

Another option is a hybrid turbo. Making the turbo more efficient than stock. Best advantage would be taken from the hybrid with a remap though. This will take you away from a stock set-up though.

[jbiswurm]

Originally Posted by agentorange

So it's been damned hot here this week and I have noticed a distinct drop off in low end grunt compared to milder temps. By hot I mean officially 108°F (42°C for my metric viewers) in the afternoon. What the temperature might be for the air hanging over the sunbaked freeway I shudder to think. Oh, we have a forecast showing three solid days of 112°F coming up. Yippee.

My immediate thought was that maybe I need a bigger intercooler. However, checking some threads on the subject I found that increased lag was a problem with larger intercoolers. I was a bit shocked by the increased weight, too. Are the stock fixing up to trebling the weight?

BTW, my car is totally stock and likely to stay that way due to the local smog inspection rules.

All advice gratefully received.

There are two thermal considerations with ICs.... external temps and internal temps due to turbo compression. Since you want to stay stock you dont have a super high internal temp load.

The other piece is that as a general rule, larger ICs will lag more which makes sense intuitively. However they will dissipate more heat.

So, bingo bango you want a smaller IC. There are plenty of great options. I have the wagner evo I competition and i love it. However, its a bit spendy. There are some good options at lower price points. Frankly at stock power levels you can do with pretty much anything. Dont overthink it.

That said, The best youll ever get is 15 degrees over ambient and youll start to see timing pulls around 110F so with out side temps >100 youre going to have a sluggish car - thats reality and we all suffer with it.