I wanted to let everyone know that there is a water to air intercooler that works very well and consistantly, without heat soaking during operation. It is produced by FMD performance and is an excellant product. It has been in developement and testing for some time now. The unit is high quality T6061 billet alluminum, all pieces are either extruded or CNC machined for a product that is second to none. We have seen a timing advance of 14 degrees. Temperature readings in the intake of 110 degrees.

 

Additional pics and graphs.

 

Additional graphs.

 

Hi, do you have a link to this company?Cost?Looks awesome!Being a cnc machinist, I can well imagine that this thing is expensive, yet the graphs are indeed impressive. More info on the company please. J

 

You can contact Anthony at 303-210-6226 or Richard at 303-246-0673, they will be more than happy to help you with questions.

 

I saw this intercooler at the MiniMeet 2004 last week in Rockford, IL - it's extremely trick and looks to me like a good solution - much better than what some others are trying by wrapping a water jacket around the stock I/C. I didn't find out about pricing, but it's supposed to be available. The number that sticks in my head from my brief conversation was that they can deliver 85 degrees of temp drop across this I/C - not too shabby!

 

Very interesting. I'd love to see a sustained run of say 15-20 minutes on a track so see how efficient the radiator is. 20 second full throttle run doesn't really mean much. I wonder how much this sucker weighs.

Paul

 

It might just be me, but this thing kinda looks small and cheap...

Compared to the Madness intercooler, this thing looks sickly...

 

small and cheap it ain't.


here is some more info on what it is based on.
http://www.kennebell.net/supercharge...iata/miata.htm

 

Judging by the pictures it looks very well put together and nicely finished. All the others I see currently out on the market seem to be doing a poor job of covering the stock air to air intercooler to turn them into water to air . From a finish standpoint this is the best I have seen so far and the numbers look quite good as well. Based on how much better constructed it looks than what is currently available tho i would expect it to be rather pricey. What the hell though speed costs

Randy
Team M7

 

paulmon, the unit is currenty on a street performance car and a full race car, both of which were at the west meets east mini meet. The cars spent three days on the track, two days of practice approximately 6 sessions lasting 30 min. each and the units performed flawlessly. The full race car was without a doubt the strongest car at the event as no one could pull on this car. The race car qualified 2nd for the ultimate mini challenge, but after a second qualifying run lost a belt and was unable to make grid before the race began and did not run.

 

Can you supply us with the ambient,inlet and outlet temps? I want to calculate the efficiency % and need those for calculation.

The GRS gets an efficiency of 78.6% where the stock IC gets 70.9% These #'s are from GRSmotorsport caclulated by andy@ross-tech.com. Check out the thread here http://www.mini2.com/forum/showthrea...=GRSmotorsport

50 degrees over ambient compared to 130 degrees over ambient sounds pretty impressive but I GRS IC (air to air) got 41.4 degrees over ambient. So I'm not all that impressed that an water to air IC is getting LESS than an air to air IC. Don't want to sound like I'm bashing your product but just comparing w/ an another uprated IC despite being air to air, and would like more data to see what's going on. Your ambient temps as tested are probably lower than what GRSmotorsports has tested at (77F)

BUT at the same time, the outlet over ambient for the stock IC was only 59.4 degrees! This is using the data supplied by GRS. So I don't know. FMD is reporting insanely high outlet over ambient temps for the stock IC (130 degrees) while GRS is reporting 77.6 degrees. If some of you have measured your outlet over ambient temps I'd be interested to find out exactly who is closer to the stock IC performance.

Sorry if I come on sounding really negative of the product which is not my intention but to compare some #'s between different options out there. I will say that it is a very slick looking product.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, I'd also like to see boost pressure readings. Thanks

 

I have no doubts the units performed flawlessly. I admitt this product looks pretty nice. What I'm looking for however is rocovery time. A water to air will, after a point, have most of the water in the cooling system pretty hot and the radiator to shed that heat has to be pretty big. Where an air to air give virtually instant recovery time as there isn't a big mass of water heating up over time.

Any pictures of the radiator?

Paul

 

I failed to mention the testing was done at 6000' with a 19% pulley. Boost pressure was 14psi at 6000' and 18psi at sea level, with car speed of 140 MPH.


Barnabas: the efficiency rating of the unit is 86%. The unit can remove 2.4 times more energy than a bar plate intercooler can. All readings were taken from the cars own OBDII port not out of the intercooler, with that as you may or may not be aware the intake manifold suffers horribly from heat soak because of the engine. These are not inflated numbers, these are reliable and repeatable numbers that everyone will be able to get if they were to do testing themselves. We have higher boost pressures and elevation to contend with.

Also based on a given that for every 6 degrees cooler air temp into the intake you see 1% power gain. Given that we are seeing aprox. 85 degree cooler temps that is 14 % more power plus you have to allow for the fact the ECU will advance timing 14 degrees, you will see a minimum of 28 HP gain, based on a 200 HP starting point.

 

paulmon, the radiator does not have to large in order to perform efficently this system uses 2 small radiators in series to better cool the fluid, also the more air flow you have the better cooling effect you have as well. Here are a couple of pics of the radiator. There is also a 1/4" space between the A/C condensor and the radiators.

 

I spoke with the gentlemen who were running this and he told me the pricepoint will be 1900.00 installed, 1800 DIY. It looks to me that 100 bucks for install would be well spent.

Their Green MINI S was an absolute monster. It basically sounded like an F5 Tornado under the hood. (A good thing) He ran a straight pipe too and I have a video of Randy Webb chasing him down into corner 1 at Blackhawk.

You'll have to ask Randy who was faster; I'm not getting into the middle of THAT. (I hear there were quite a few politics with the race that day.)

I made it with my small digital camera so apologies for the poor quality.

http://mcs.maximus-consulting.com/HPIM0282.MPG

-Jim

 

There seems to have been a misquote on price. The retail is $ 1860.00 plus install. Estimated install time is 4 hours.

 

Is there a website with more info?

 

That is seriously a good price. I was expecting at least over $2k by itself without install. Anyways, 86% efficiency is very good and thanks for giving me the info I requested. Also where are the temp sensors for inlet,outlet located on the MCS? I'm assuming they come installed from the factory since you said you got the data through the OBDII port. Anyways thanks for sharing what looks like a fantastic product. I still need to figure out the discrepancy between your data and data given by GRSmotorsports for the stock IC. But if what you say is true, very very nice...Definitely interested in the product.

 

The web site is currently under construction so for now you can call and request info or talk with them about the product.

Anthony @ 303-210-6226

Richard @ 303-246-0673

 

Nice video, Jim - do you know if anybody has more video available from that race?

 

This intercooler looks very promising, but it is not possible to calculate intercooler efficiency without the addition of a temp gauge for the supercharger outlet. How was your efficiency calculated? What was your measured efficiency for the stock intercooler in exactly the same conditions? See this thread for some testing I did with the stock intercooler:

https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...ler+efficiency

 

All data is from the OBD II port, the cars computer system, so the numbers are real world numbers as is found in the engine itself. I will be doing outlet and inlet temp readings of the intercooler itself this weekend. These numbers will be even lower temps after intercooler because of the air has not reached the intake. The intake temp is the most important because this is what the engine sees not the temp just after the intercooler. The system that Kenne Bell uses for the Miata is bassically the same, the core is the same as is the pump running the system. The cores are proven to be 86% efficient and thusly the system can be no less efficient. Again I will do air temps before and after intercooler soon and will post results, again these numbers are not real world numbers though but I will be glad to post them for you.

 

I have some info on engine timing, if you retard ignition timing by 4 degrees you loose 16 HP. With the stock intercooler temp readings we were getting we saw a 7 degree retard in ignition timing. So that would give a 28 HP loss with stock intercooler. We are seeing approx. 14 degrees of advance timing. So that should help put into perspective what the FMD intercooler is doing for you in terms of more HP.

 

Mars...


fill me in..


how does the intercooler affect the ignition timing???