[Formulajones]

Originally Posted by Navy Horn 16

It's important to remember that what you get on your gauge is only reading the temperature at one point in the entire cooling system. It should be on your water crossover which is essentially your water inlet temperature. That tells you how hot the water is when it goes back into the motor. If your cooling system is being overwhelmed, it will be really hot at this point.

So you are going to have a pretty big split between your inlet and outlet temp, which is why all these comments about needing to boil water out of your oil are nonsense. Your water temp reading isn't your oil temp, or your exhaust manifold temp, and darn sure isn't some kind of "power" equivalent. A well cooled engine runs better, lasts longer, and makes more power. I run a 160 degree thermostat, and it never gets above 175 unless I'm sitting in traffic in the summer (in Texas).

Before I got my Cold Case radiator, I got stuck in the staging lanes and did a pass with the motor around 205, and was .2 slower than the previous run. Go to a drag strip and ask people if they run their engines as hot as possible or as cool as possible.

Yep, even my sons fuel injected mustang doesn't like heat. We were at the track a few weeks ago and I tried hot lapping it, the car slowed down. It ran it's best times with a full cool off. I keep a 180 stat in that one with a cold case radiator. Preferably I don't like to see the temps above 190 in it because it will ping and complain on our 91 pump gas when the temps get that high, and it's just a bone stock 9:1 engine assembled by Ford. I don't dare run cheaper gas in this one during the summer months, especially with the AC on. Matter of fact when I was hot lapping it, it had some slight ping during the longer pull in 3rd gear. The slow drive back to the pits cooled the car down, a testament to the efficiency of that Cold Case radiator. Then a 20 minute cool down in the pits with the hood up was the ticket for best times. If I had ice I would have been icing down the intake.