Good stuff, dude! DIY vents in the usual vent positions would be sick. The singular vents are rad but it's always cool seeing someone who didn't take the mainline approach to something. That being said, I met a guy at the track before who had used some Home Depot A/C vents in his NA hood. Functional, but ugly lol. Also potentially of use to you: SixShooter is using bumper vents from a 2007 or 2008 WRX (or STI?) in his hood for hood vents. I think the bumper vents are $35 a piece on Amazon or something like that.

You were running the "simple" closed loop boost control in TS previously, right? I don't think I've ever seen anyone else running that option for boost control.

 

@sonofthehill I do everything in Celsius personally, but I figure everyone on here is used to F, so I usually try to post both, IE 90 C (194 F). 25C ≈ 75 F so often I'll use those interchangeably since it's a quick conversion. I got lazy in that last post since I was typing it out quickly. FWIW I'm in the states but changed my phone to use C before a trip in Europe and never changed it back, so I'm just getting more and more used to it.

My tuning software is in C for everything, so usually all of my tuning talk is in C.

@Z_WAAAAAZ The "Simple" closed loop is a speeduino thing, not a tuner studio thing. They both use tuner studio, but I was blown away the first time I opened up a MS3 tune. There are so many more tables/options compared to Speeduino. IMO the Simple closed loop is basically open loop that lets you set the wastegate duty below a certain MAP for faster spooling. There is some type of PID loop going on, but in my experience it doesn't do much to hit targets unless your open loop is spot on.

The Subaru vents are great, and they are/were on my list. I'm leaning towards something like the RGR vents for the drivers side. I want to get some venting going on near the turbo to help let that heat out. My reasoning for tinkering with my own design is that I'd really like to have covers for them. I suspect in the winter, and likely even spring, I would struggle to get to temp with the vents. I could always put some nutserts somewhere, but I'm enjoying tinkering with CAD as well.

 

Really? I'm pretty sure my TS shows a "simple" closed loop boost control option. I'll have to go back and check. My memory is spotty at best most days. Sounds about what I'd expect, though. There's so much deviation in everybody's PID settings that I can't imagine a "simple" closed loop strategy would be a one size fits all for a wide range of cars.

Agreed with you on the vent covers. I never thought I needed covers when I was running the 3-vent setup, but I'd really like to implement something now that I'm running 5 and the air filter is exposed to the elements if it starts raining. My strategy this last winter if it started raining unexpectedly was to place a shopping bag on my air filter and then forget about it until the next day when it would shift back and start smoking on my turbo. Did I just admit that? Sh*t.

 

Lol, jus' teasin'!
Only C's I know are 100=boiling, 55=too hot to hold, 37=womb temperature(human), 0=ice, -20=freezer, -80=biological freezer, -192=LN2 vapor phase. So 75 and your *** is cooking, but don't mind me, carry on.

 

Haha, that's a good range of values.

Starting off I knew that you took a layer of clothing off for every 10 C.

0 C is a coat, jacket, and shirt
10 C is a jacket and shirt
20 C is a shirt
30 C is no shirt

Looking back on it, I might need to add another layer to that, but you get the idea. 28 C is 82 F, so that's another freebie.

The easy conversion is to take C, double it and add 32. Works well enough for the 32-100 F range.

 

FWIW, the Subaru vents actually have a very small opening compared to Singular. They are better than nothing and comparatively better here during torrential thunderstorms but for track work Singular was necessary.

I actually opened up the Subaru vents significantly but the openings are still relatively small.

 

Alright, so to torture test this car and myself I signed up for autocross this weekend. High temps are 41 and 38 C (~105, 100 F), so that's going to suck. We'll start and end early, but I don't expect the car to be able to make it through all the runs without limiting out due to coolant temp. Having said that, I did a few things to give it the best chance it has.

Coolant was bled again. I got a few small bubbles out but nothing major.

I also got some tape and sealed off some of the ducting I had previously done. No idea how this will hold up, but I the tape I used was pretty sticky and designed to be usable underwater.

Here's what we started with. The passenger side seemed to be worse than the drivers side.


I remember this looking better when I first did it.

So, my ducting was a bit worse than I remembered, but the Intercooler piping does push the coroplast in a way that puts it right up against the bottom of the radiator, so that's something.





So, not sure it's the best ducting in the world, but maybe that will help some. I also sealed off that side of the mouth using a bit of chloroplast. I see all the fast guys have the mouths of their cars sealed up, and I want to go fast.

In the tune, I've got both fans kicking on a bit sooner and the coolant sensor filter is almost all the way up which seems to cover up the coolant spikes. I still believe I'm getting a reasonably accurate temp reading this way and my rev limiter drops around 108 C (225 F) so I'll know if I'm getting that hot even if I'm mid run. I might run wastegate pressure as well depending on how hot/bad things are looking.

Side note, I usually shut my car down between runs, but I've been thinking about it lately and it seems like it will work better to leave it running with the hood open and continue spraying the rad/IC with water. It seems like it would pull more heat out of the system than it would introduce. We'll see how that works. It would be really convenient if I could have some sort of valve to open/close that vent, maybe something controlled by the ECU with some type of filtering system in between .

I also think I "solved" my issue with filling my gas tank. Long story short, I removed the cap on the old EVAP system hardline and am running some hose out into the fender. This is mostly a POC but I've filled up once or twice without the issue I used to have (super slow filling with the fuel filler constantly clicking off like the tank was full).

EDIT - Don't do this, or use more hose or something. This hose ended up spitting liquid fuel on a long, hot roadtrip. Enough fuel for me to smell it in the cabin when cruising around town. Would not recommend.

The curly q is to try to prevent any potential liquid from splashing out freely.

Still debating on the hood cut. I found the RGR vents that seem to be pretty cheap and I like the look. Also debating how badly I want to keep AC. At this point the AC doesn't cool the car down too much, so I don't run it anyway most of the time. Might get it serviced and give it one more chance.

I also took the car up to the top of the local ski hill. Probably the best road we have around here. Didn't get any pictures but it was pretty nice towards the top. We were sitting around 90 C coolant on the way up and closer to 85 on the way down. Felt good to just cruise for a bit.

 

Do you have anything blocking up the area between the bumper cover and the top and bottom of the plastic bumper support (crash structure) to keep air from going towards the headlights?

 

Good luck this weekend, man! Nothing like some summer weather to get you going all out trying to control temps haha. Hopefully you see some positive results with the modifications. I've had good luck sealing gaps with foil tape, although multiple layers are usually needed because it's so thin. It seems to adhere better than electrical/marine-style tape when substantial amounts of heat are applied.

Glad you got the evap system sorted for now too. I had my hardline capped off like yours too before realizing that was THE breather port for the fuel tank haha. I don't know if NBs are the same, but my front subframe has a nipple on the passenger side for a vacuum line to go from the vent side of the OEM evap canister. I just plumbed some vacuum line straight from the hardline to that nipple in the subframe to keep any fuel vapors out of the engine bay. Still curious if your car has the check valves in the evap line next to the fuel pump. I remember my car had two valves in-line and they were both partially plugged, causing refueling issues even after I pulled the cap off the aforementioned hardline. I removed them and it got rid of my refueling issues entirely.

Alright, enough about the less-exciting stuff. Looking forward to hearing about how this weekend goes!

 

@Z_WAAAAAZ I'll have to keep an eye open for that port next time I'm under the car. I might try to find where the hardline starts in the rear of the car and vent it there to keep the fumes away from the engine bay, but this works for now.

@sixshooter I've got this plate up top to help seal the upper area to the radiator, not sure if that's what you were talking about. I don't believe I have any ducting on the upper side of the bumper cover mouth. I've used a bit of AC insulation foam to help seal up some of the gaps near the headlights, but you make a good point that there could still be a lot of air escaping out.

The side ducting does go fairly high up, and I've got the sides of those sealed off with foam.

 

Bro, the outside is a trap. I highly recommend not going there.

Thank God we did all our runs at once today. Thankfully we wrapped runs up around 1 PM when it was about 32 C (90 F) outside. I was able to keep coolant just around 103 C ( 217 F), although it was a pretty forgiving course that didn't involve a ton of full throttle. Everything was so hot though, I think I went through a gallon of water or more in my tire/intercool/radiator sprayer. IATs were the highest I've ever recorded at 62 C (144 F)! I'm sure the steel Intercooler piping doesn't help. I think I'm likely going to order a Kraken manifold, DP and IC soon so I can be done with the power side of things for a while.

Took second in class today. Unfortunately I coned away a run that would've put me at 4th raw and a class win for the day, but oh well.

After a couple hours at the afterparty the ambient temp was up to 39 C (102 F). I didn't like it, the car didn't like it. Temps were climbing on the freeway and oil pressure got down around 17 at the stoplight on the off ramp.

Hood vents were ordered yesterday, I wish I would've ordered them sooner at this point.

 

Sometimes you need a kick in the pants like that to take the next necessary step on a project hahaha. Congrats on the result! Glad the car held up for the day despite the heat, but yeah, I hate having an issue like that and keeping my eyes glued to the gauges scared of what they might say next.

Are you tracking oil pressure only or temperature too? Just trying to extrapolate what your oil temp might've been when you got off the freeway. My oil pressure is around 23-25psi at 185-190*F and 1100rpm. Think it sits around 20 or so at idle once oil temp gets to ~210*. This is with 15W40 Rotella T6.

I think you're going to be very happy once you put the vents in haha.

 

@Z_WAAAAAZ I'm only tracking pressure right now. In the long term I'd like to have oil temp, coolant pressure, turbo speed and likely more, but those haven't been the biggest priority and I'm out of inputs on the ECU. Maybe if/when I go to a better ECU I'll add those.

 

Ok, so after watching temperatures climb on the freeway I was motivated to try to increase some airflow through the heat exchanger stack. I've got IC->AC Condenser->Radiator. I got some new Dremel cutoff wheels and decided to hack up the hood temporarily. The vents I ordered are going in the sections of the hood between the bracing, so in a couple weeks I'll be cutting out these sections of the hood anyway.

I did this to try to increase cooling, but I also figured that it was more experience. Might as well learn on something that would be replaced soon than on something that would be on the car permanently.

I'm not sure if other people get this way, but sometimes I can tell that I'm going to half *** a project before it starts. I'll get a feeling that I know the end product is going to turn out poorly because I'm trying to take shortcuts or just not investing the time to do the job properly.



Things I learned from this one

1. A Dremel is not the right tool for this one. I tried mine which started smoking, and my roommates was getting super hot. I suspect that's at least partially user error. A friend offered to let me use his air powered body saw, so when I put the real hood vents in I'll be using that.
2. This can be done without removing the hood, but if you've got the time I'd take the hood off. I'll be doing that for the full cut. I threw aluminum dust all over my windshield and dropped bits of aluminum into the engine bay (which was covered with a tarp).
3. Masking tape works pretty well to line up cuts.

Anyway, that's all to say that I'm not proud of this one, and it's not a good example of my craftsmanship, but it is my work at the end of the day.


Tape lined up by eye. I drilled small holes in the corners before cutting.

Long needle nose pliers worked well to bend the tabs. Bend these down before cutting the next one or the hood just flexes instead of bending.

I would recommend taking the hood off for best results. I was on a time crunch and my heart wasn't into it.

End result




So not the worst thing I've ever done, but not great. Also, I didn't get any real data, but I don't think they did too much, if anything to help cooling. The larger vent in the rear did have a lot of hot air flowing out of it when I was parked and the rad fan was running, so that's something. I did run on the freeway with them and the temps seemed more stable, but it was also cooler outside and the sun was down, so not apples to apples on that comparison.

I ended up with the larger vent in the rear because the Dremel was getting so hot. I decided to just cut the sides another inch instead of trying to cut 2-3 more flaps that would have been 6" or more. In hindsight, I would just cut 2 large vents total, instead of trying to do all the ribs/flaps. Like I said earlier, this was mostly an experiment to see if it would help and give me a bit more experience hacking things up.

 

On Sunday I took the win for XB over the class leader. We've got a good battle going and are usually neck and neck. He's driving a 2.5 swapped NC.

Thankfully I was driving in the early group, so ambient temps were in the 80s. Coolant was peaking around around 105 C ( 221 F) and IATs peaked around 63 C (145 F).

I had a couple issues with the tune. I setup AFR protections. Basically just simple failsafe settings in case an injector fails, but it ended up interfering with my launches. I realized this after 2-3 launches that resulted in the car cutting out as soon as I got into boost. I'm using fuel cut for launch control. The car gets into boost very quickly when the clutch is let out, but the AFR's take a second to catch up as the fuel cut makes it super lean. This will just require some fine tuning on my end.

The car was also cutting out towards finish on a couple runs. I looked at some logs thinking it was possibly oil pressure or AFR protection, but neither look like they turned on. It felt like an ECU cut and not a misfire. I still suspect the AFR protection getting triggered from DFCO and a lot of transient throttle movement, but the logs don't support that theory.

Overall that was a bit frustrating, but not detrimental. I did my last run on wastegate pressure just to be safe and the car behaved fine.

The pit strategy I ended up using was to let the car idle after a run until the secondary fan stopped running. After that I shut the car down assuming there was going to be a couple minutes until my next run. I was spraying the IC and radiator religiously. In my mind this allows the car to pull excess heat from the system and once that heat is dissipated then I can shut the car down to allow further cooling.

In general right now my oil pressure seems pretty low when the car is heat soaked. I've seen close to 17 at idle a couple times now, running Rotella T6 15-40. I'm thinking I'll send a sample to Blackstone on the next change and see if I've cooked this oil.




The center rib on these is worn much more on one side than the other. I need to do my research, but I'm guessing this is either from overdriving the car and understeering, or too little camber (-2.5 rear, -3 front currently). I plan to run these for at least the rest of this season and maybe some of the earlier events next season when it's cold out.

Bonus photo because it was on my phone and I know you sick bastards will appreciate the "hoochie shorts". Believe it or not, this is what peak performance looks like. Not approved for Kirkeys.

 

Oh damn dude, I didn't realize that wasn't the end of your weekend recap. You got busy haha!

I feel you bigtime on realizing you're gonna half-*** a project before it starts. I usually have to force myself to commit to spending the whole day on a project and not make any other plans, to ensure I don't rush things and do excessively-ghetto sh*t.
That being said, I think any visual imperfection is forgivable given it was being done to get the car performing the night before an event, and that part of the hood is going to disappear anyways.

Once you have all three vents installed, I think the difference should be pretty noticeable. I'd bet the current vents will make a difference in an apples-to-apples comparison, but the open surface area isn't going to be enough to allow all of the hot air mass coming from the radiator to exit the underhood area.

Oh, also on the coattails of hot oil pressure, I'll see my oil pressure at idle drop a little below 20psi once it's in the 220-230* range. I'd assume without a cooler, your oil is probably above that temp range at the end of an autoX run. Long story short, what I'm trying to say is that I'd imagine that's within spec, and your oil is just getting hot.

Oh and sh*t, more importantly congrats on taking the W on Sunday!

 

Nice man! Who cares about the hacked vents, if you go for real vents those areas are cut out anyways. Works for me.

Nice work besting a 2.5 NC. I can tell you one thing, the NC is a hell of a car and hard to beat even in a setup F/I NA/NB. My buddy has one and he's only a few seconds off me at our local track. His is pretty setup at this point but on a stock 2.0. They make so much grip it's kinda nuts.

 

Thanks guys! I'd like to codrive that NC at some point, but if my car is operable I'm going to choose that. I think the 2.5 swaps make around 180 HP which seems like it would suit the car really well.

Glad to hear the oil pressures don't seem alarming. This is the first car I've monitored oil pressures in so I'm still learning what "normal" values are.

I ended up getting a 7 piece set of vents. 1 vent for each section on the perimeter of the hood. The plan is to do the 3 on the exhaust side of the engine bay first. If that's sufficient I'll leave it there for now. If it seems like more venting is needed then the other 4 will go on. I found these vents on Etsy of all places and they're designed like the R-Theory vents. It was about $170 shipped, and I believe they are powder coated (maybe just painted?). I figure if I don't use the other 4 then I can sell them and recoup some costs.

 

Nice job this weekend and congratulations!

I know you had a couple of hiccups, but overall sounds like a lot of things are working well. 17psi at idle with what we can assume is very hot oil doesn't sound alarming to me either. My oil pressure is similar to @Z_WAAAAAZ with this VVT engine, although I haven't gotten it hotter than 207F to see if it drops below 20psi with the boundary pump. The BP-4W used to idle around 20psi with oil at 160F, if it was 80F hotter I would had expected a few less psi as yours shows.

 

Well done on the 2nd, frustrating to miss the win, but lessons learnt there is always next time.

Your incoming vents are flush, like what you did in the photos above? My understanding is that they need a projection upstream, to create a low pressure area over the outlet which sucks the engine bay hot air out. While flush will (probably) work, it won't work as well.

Kudos to you for seeing the need and acting quickly. Thanks for the tip on removing the bonnet, I am (still) about to start on my Singular vents, and was planning to do it on the car until your experience..