Miata Turbo Forum - Boost cars, acquire cats. - power steering cooler options

Quote:

Originally Posted by hosspoons (Post 700999)

it takes a lot of shoulder in tight turns.

Sounds like too much caster. Run a depowered car at 5.5-6 degrees like everyone else does, and you can skip the gym after work. Run it at ~3.5 degrees and you can drive it with your fingertips - and since you don't have a huge hydraulic system in the way, your fingertips can actually feel what's going on.

Look at all the effort my fingertips are putting into steering my 225mm R-comp-shod Miata through a fairly tight autocross course:

Quote:

Originally Posted by JasonC SBB (Post 701099)

PM me the price.

To all the others: When PS conks out in WRC cars, they slow down a hell of a lot.
Not that I'm Sebastien Loeb, but I like being able to catch the tail very quickly.

That comparison is so ridiculously flawed I don't even know where to start, Jason.

When the PS FAILS, you are pumping fluid through the failed pump, all of the lines, etc. when you turn the wheel. I've driven a car with the PS/AC belt off - it was downright awful and it's no wonder it slows them down. When you depower a rack, though, you get rid of all of the fluid, so the two examples are not even REMOTELY comparable.

Let's ignore the fact that the two situations wouldn't be comparable even in the same car, though. It's still a WRC car - NOT a Miata. WRC cars go down roads I would think twice about traveling in my truck, and they do it at speeds my truck cannot obtain on pavement, let alone on such a road. I can't imagine the kind of forces that rocks, ditches, etc. put on the steering systems, but those guys have to go breakneck speeds stage after stage after stage without getting tired out. If the wheel is snapping around, it's going to be tiring (and potentially dangerous - if a big enough rock were to grab a tire I could see a broken hand fairly easily).

I'm no Frenchman either, but I have absolutely no trouble catching fairly lurid, obscene slides, even at triple-digit speeds, with my depowered rack. Nick drove my car for a session at Buttonwillow on Saturday and commented on how easy it was to drive sideways, in fact.

If you want a cheap PS cooler, buy a cheap fluid cooler, stick some compression/barb adapters on the stock PS cooler lines, and jam the cooler somewhere. It's not difficult to do.