BMW 502 Race Preperation

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Cooling, Or Should I Say COOLING---A Big Deal On This Car

The BMW V8 engine is famous for running hot and we have worked hard to cool it down. We replaced the stock 4-bladed small fan with a rare larger tropical fan. We had a custom built radiator fabricated to be as large as possible for the space we had by a racing radiator company (in Canada, of all places). We added a special hi volume electrical fan to the front of the radiator where it pushes air back through. When this fan burned up we redesigned the system for a Bosch auxiliary fan from an E30 325i. We also built a scoop below the bumper and removed the lower pan behind the bumper so that a larger volume of air could get to the radiator. We drilled large holes in the back of the inner fender panels to allow easier exit of hot air from the engine compartment. We removed the original thermostat and replaced it with the hi-flow thermostat from an E30 M3. What else?

    We also worked on cooling the engine oil, because the engine oil is an important part of the engine's cooling system. The old stock V8 has an oil cooler that's actually inside the engine, much like in a modern Porsche 944. It is an oil-water heat exchanger that cools the hot oil by circulating it through tubes immersed in the already marginal cooling system. We have removed that cooler and rerouted oil flow and oil cooling to the outside of the engine. The oil now runs through braided steel hoses to an oil-air heat exchanger we made by putting two E30 325i oil coolers together in series. This new cooler is mounted in the air stream behind the left air intake that used to supply fresh air to the driver footwell.

    The final area of cooling that had to be improved was passenger compartment cooling. This sucker was hot inside! On our shakedown cruise to the Colorado Octoberfest the driver compartment floor was 130-140 degrees and the inside of the firewall was consistently 152-158. The TOPS of my shoes were 120 degrees and the bottoms were hotter. We've done a lot of insulating since then. We've carpeted the driver and passenger floors, we've lined the panels beneath the floor and the engine compartment firewall with light but effective aluminized insulating panels. We added the sunroof to the car in an attempt to get better airflow. Klaus Kutscher, shop boss at Mobile Tradition in Munich, told us that Nascar racers have the same problem and that one of the things they do is have the exhaust manifolds ceramic coated. We sent our manifolds off to Jett Hot and had them coated inside and out. After installation they were wrapped in asbestos tape to further reduce heat escape. Finally, we have added 12-volt fans for each passenger. During the race we intend to further fight this heat problem by dressing head to toe in three layers of flameproof nomex and wearing full-face helmets.

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