Turbo - to water cool or not?
 

Hi Guys

I just had a new Exhaust manifold (and cold side) made to replace the old brittle manifold that needed a repair after every meeting.

While there i asked the race shop to tidy up oil feed lines/fittings etc with the idea of "maybe" doing some 1 -3 hour endurance races. With that in mind he also suggested adding water cooling to the t28 turbo and we went ahead with that too. Engine/turbo package came to me without water cooling and has run fine for the past year without (and 2-3 years with previous owner).

In talking to a pretty experienced MX5 guy here he said that from what he has read lately, water cooling the turbo isn't really necessary and that if anything it just adds heat to the water system...

What is the thinking about this from you guys?

Water cooling is mostly to prevent "coking" upon shutdown for people who are too dumb to let their cars run for a minute or two after beating the hell out of it.

If you have a water cooled turbo, water cool it. If you have an oil cooled turbo, don't worry about it.

I'd never go out of my way to replace an oil cooled turbo with a water cooled turbo.

Oil cooling is seperate to being Oil lubricated i presume...?

nope. same

like these guys said - the water cooling doesn't do much during engine operation, and is more to keep you from baking the chra.

if you have water ports on the turbo I would definitely use them. its so easy to set it up. there isn't much of a down side

On Garrett units, it's specifically utilized to prevent the bearing cage from melting after a hot shutdown. It has nothing to do with the oiling system or "coking".

If your turbo has watercooling ports, and you don't use them, you are lazy or foolish (or both).

My bad, i'm not fancy enough for Garrett turbos.

If it's a real T28, it's a Garrett...