Hi all
Will hopefully be buying a Mk1 Turbo when then right one comes up.
I was wondering if I should be concerned about heat build up in the engine bay, and if anyone has any first hand experience of this. Anything I need to focus on to help get rid of the heat?
Thanks!

 

Might I recommend that you look at each Sticky under each sub forum before you ask questions. At least do that little bit of reading. If not useful, try the search bar at the top right of the screen. Lastly if the forum search sucks, try google and adding the term miataturbo to your search, it does much better than the forum search. You will be surprised to see what wealth of information has already been collected.

Please try this kind sir. Others will not be as kind if you don't.

 

What other mods are done to the car?

If stock i say just send it.

The way to cool a miata is as follows

• Factory radiator turns brown and cracks (upgrade to a good crossflow)
• Poor engine cooling design from Mazda. Long story short the miata motors were FWD motors so flow path was good. but then put in a RWD chassis flow path changed and was bad. So to rectify that a coolant reroute is the answer.
• Fully seal the radiator to the bumper mouth. aka ducting. A properly ducted setup ensures all the air that goes through the bumper mouth is pushed through the radiator
• Following proper ducting brings us to the next item. Flow the the radiator core is a game of pressures. You are forcing a bunch of air into the mouth of the car and it has to go somewhere. So you want to have the lowest pressure possible behind the radiator core to aid in airflow. If you have a big high pressure spot behind the radiator none of the above matters because you arnt moving air through the core. This is why a lot of guys are running hood vents. Now with hood vents it not just a matter of blowing holes in your hood. There are high and low pressure spots on the hood so with a vent package like singular motorsports its optimized to take advantage of the low pressure zones. The other option is to have a second set of ducting that goes from the rear of the radiator and out the hood. This is the best option but is hard to package.

Now if you have been following along you know the how and why to cool the cars. I would go supermiata radiator and reroute and singular vents. But thats just me. There are lots of options to look at.

 

What he said ^ plus my two cents:
When you run a motor (and cooling system) that was designed for ~100 hp and force, persay, 200hp worth of air and fuel into it, i think its pretty safe to assume it will generate 2x the heat and dissipating that extra heat will take twice the effort of the stock arrangement.
​​​​to handle under-hood temps, a DIY heatshield over the turbine housing and downpipe is pretty commonplace. I dont hear allot about people here trusting turbo blankets but those are also an option.

 

I have mixed opinions of the turbo blankets. I know here they are frowned upon becasue of the worry of an oil leak and fire. How many oil leaks are people really having? When i was turbo i never had an oil line failure. In the diesel world turbo blankets are common practice.

Just food for thought.

 

I was on the track last year, my ring land cracked causing the piston ring to wear a groove into my bore, this then caused pressure in my crankcase pushing the dip stick out of the holder.
Oil was pushed out of the dip stick, bounced off my bonnet and onto my turbo (with turbo blanket fitted) causing this.....


I suspect that I did not allow enough ring gap when rebuilding my engine.

 

I believe they are frowned about on here due to killing the CHRA, more then causing fires due to oil leaks.

 

I think it’s humorous when a newb comes in, poses a question, leaves, and we just carry on in our own little MT world.