458 High intake temperature

Thanks for your post. What was the name of the heat reflecting gold film you used and where did you get it from?

Cheers!

 

Thanks for the info! Where did you get the high performance air ductwork?

Cheers!

 

Did you say gold? Where do you live? (Just kidding).

Well, I gotta think about this one a little. First, the tape will only help with radiant heat, which (if my science doesn’t fail me completely) is only a small percentage of the overall heat being generated in your engine compartment (the vast majority is conductive heat).

Second, taking air from a cooler location (down lower in your engine compartment out of harms way) seems logical and should help. But you don’t want to inadvertently suck in too much road debris (sand, dirt, etc).

Because you are going two things at once, it won’t be possible to tell the relative effect of each change. And upsizing the intake may or may not help, as the filter element is typically the controlling resistance, That’s why high flow filter manufacturers like K&N are in business.

But a caveat here as well. Their filters may be higher flow at the expense of filtration effectiveness. In other words, you could be introducing more debris into the engine.

Would have been interesting to monitor intake temperatures before and after. Harder to do particle counts in situ………

 

There's so many factors in play, and you don't know whether or not it makes power until you test it.

I've done a fair bit of dyno testing over the years, and what I have found is that, as long as the air is pulled from the outside or other cool place, the temp of the intake components have next to no effect on power. The air moves so fast that is has almost no time to pick up heat from the inside boundary layer of the plumbing. I have done tests where the intake plumbing and intake was burning hot and next cooled to a freeze with dry ice. Even in very high hp applications over 1000 hp, it was less than 3-4 numbers.

Now on the flipside, changing the intake design can have a radically different outcome. One thing which the brightest boffins in the automotive industry can agree upon, is the fact that Ferrari is probably the best and most advanced when it comes to intake designs. Ferrari not only uses a lot of flow data to create the shape of airboxes etc. they spend a ton of time getting the plenum volume right. Even changing to a different filter insert like a BMC or K&N can have a negative effect. Yes it increases flow, but it also increases the plenum volume as the physical mass is less. I've personally seen a stock 458 getting a BMC filter installed and lose power. The window one has to work within when it comes to the positive and negative effects of changing plenum volume is tiny to say the least.

Lastly there's the possible negative effects of changing the path of the airflow. Adding a soft 90 degree bend in either an inlet tube or exhaust for that matter, can have a shockingly bad effect. I've seen as much as 30 numbers lost due to someone trying to place a filter in a cooler location, and all that changed was the bend. Even the actual length stayed unchanged.

I think the heat shielding is a good thing from a longevity standpoint. However, I would not mess with the intake design.

Personally I'd look into whether the exhaust manifolds could be wrapped. And then I would check and see if there's any part of the fuel delivery system that needs heat shielding. If one thinks hot air kills power, it is nothing compared to what hot fuel does.

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Good list of observations by @Il Co-Pilota. The cats are massive heat collectors. 200 Cell cats will improve your heat transfer out of the engine compartment.