cold air intakes mythbusted?

[igkgunn]

[Swindog]

thats cool...and backs up my thoughts about them.'

mythbusted

[Stoffa]

but im sure if you retuned with a cold air intake you'd get a better gain.

[Guest]

its not exactly a high performance vehicle i wonder if 400kw would make a difference with having a cold airbox and feed or not. a 3" intake shouldnt pose a restriction. i think factory airbox is the best way to go if you can use/fit it not to easy with custom turbo set ups though.

[funkytown]

 Stoffa said:

but im sure if you retuned with a cold air intake you'd get a better gain.

And using actually 150km/h wind speed (not those shit fans) coupled with constant beating / engine laoding in that speed region. The test is flawed as

[madmike]

I dion't know if it is Funky... As a general rule and test i would say the test was bang on...

[slystiguy]

probably more intended for the street side than track but interesting still.

[petrolheadjman]

Just thinking outloud here,

especially on a track, when the car is getting increasingly warm, keeping the air 'cold' becomes a bigger issue? That skylines engine temps wouldn't be very high at all compared to when on the track so the cold air doesn't make much of a difference, but when as funky says your coming down at 150+ it would?

[Swindog]

Remember though and probably the most important point was no matter what they did to the filter, the engine temp stayed the same

[igkgunn]

On the other hand, power on a dyno isn't everything. It could just be in my head, but when I changed from air box to pod it didn't seem to pull harder but it did seem a bit more responsive. Plus I definitely love the sound of a turbo through a poddy without all the factory baffling.

[subieboy]

 Swindog said:

Remember though and probably the most important point was no matter what they did to the filter, the engine temp stayed the same

Aye that be true

Also as far as power went (just to get off topic for a second) - there has been numerous test that have proven pod filters dont give you anymore performance (no or negligible power increase) than stock filter...

True some do flow better but let in a lot of crud...

To prove the point here ia an article of my favourite website:

http://www.autospeed.com.au/cms/A_112227/article.html?popularArticle

And yes I know its a diesel they are testing but same go's for petrol really

 

Acceleration is very similar in the mid-range (2000 – 3000 rpm) but at the bottom-end (as the turbo starts boosting hard) and at the top end (where airflow is at its greatest) performance is clearly poorer.

If in fact the power is being harmed by added airflow not being coped with by the engine management, this result makes sense.

So it would appear that the straight-through resonator has made a difference to engine breathing. The trouble is that, as a result, performance is going backwards.

[Koom]

 madmike said:

I dion't know if it is Funky... As a general rule and test i would say the test was bang on...

I'm with Funky on this. If our test technicians run tests like that at work and came to all conquering conclusions from them, they'd be out of a job pretty damn quickly. About the only thing the busted was the bogus claim of 20% power increase which you'd be nuts to believe in the first place. Cold airboxes still very much have their place IMO and that test didn't do a good job of convincing me otherwise.