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GT grille blocking engine air intake

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JDee

Ancient Racer
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As the title says, the picture below shows my grille right in front of where the engine air intake is. I wonder why Ford would have most of that blocked off? And secondary to that, would it be beneficial to grind out some more of those blocked off areas? It seems to me it would be a good thing to do, but if that's true why did Ford not do it?

IMG_20190325_174345.jpg
 
1,246
1,243
In the V6L
Weather. Your intake has to work in a snow or ice storm. Ford has set it up to minimize the interference with airflow in normal conditions while ensuring that the intake doesn't get plugged up if you're driving in a snowstorm. Seriously.
 

JDee

Ancient Racer
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Cool! Except my car has never even been driven in rain let alone snow! I don't do wet track days, and that's all my car is used for now. It is still hibernating in the garage, though it will be waking up in a week.

So given the above, would it help airflow at all to open those closed up grill areas? Ram air effect? I put PP2 on over the winter with a sealed airbox top.
 
1,246
1,243
In the V6L
...So given the above, would it help airflow at all to open those closed up grill areas? Ram air effect? I put PP2 on over the winter with a sealed airbox top.
When I was doing datalogging and calibration on my supercharged 2011 Mustang GT, I put air pressure sensors in the intake runner and filter box and did measurements of pressure loss and how the grill affected it. I didn't find a measurable difference when I opened up the grill. It didn't hurt, but it didn't help either. The same series of measurements also indicated that the factory paper air filter flowed better than the K&N that the blower kit had come with.
 

JDee

Ancient Racer
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The same series of measurements also indicated that the factory paper air filter flowed better than the K&N that the blower kit had come with.

Don't you just love how real data sometimes blows holes in things that are often accepted as fact? :):p:D

Would the fact that it was supercharged have affected your findings at all? I mean in terms of a blower, er, sucker/blower perhaps creating negative pressure vs a naturally aspirated car that would not do that to the same extent?

For whatever reason my brain thinks it would help to open that area up and get a healthy dose of ram air in there. I guess I'll try it as it is this spring, get a baseline of sorts and then open it up and see what happens. And hope for all other things being equal when I do it.
 
1,246
1,243
In the V6L
Yup. The difference was small, but it was repeatable. I collected my data by putting my own pressure sensors in the various places I was measuring and combining that with PID data from the ECU via an SCT X3 and a laptop. I collected hours of engine data on a racetrack, so I had pretty robust information - much more than you get with a selection of dyno pulls. And of course, I had data from idle all the way to full power, so inconsistencies really stood out.

The air flow data was measured with a static pressure sensor behind the grill out of the airstream and a second one in the filter housing. If there'd been a ram-air effect, the static sensor would have read the same pressure, but the pressure in the filter housing would have been higher. It wasn't at any power level. As for the effect of the blower, all it did was increase the maximum flow by about 50%, so there was more pressure drop at full power, but the effect was linear - when operating at a throttle level that produced "normal" airflow for an NA engine, the conclusion was the same - no effect from the grill openings that I'd so carefully opened up.

I'm not saying "don't do it", just get your expectations in order before you start. If you get more power, that's fantastic, just don't be surprised if you don't
 

JDee

Ancient Racer
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Wow! That is surprising, not at all what one would expect but you can't argue with hard data like that. It could also be a negative in terms of getting a lot of track slag and garbage into the intake that would otherwise not get in there. Thanks muchly for the insights, I think the time would be better spent elsewhere.
 

Bill Pemberton

0ld Ford Automotive Racing Terror
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JAJ showed what we tried to tell many folks who wanted to replace paper filters in Vipers. The SRT Engineers told us they would not breathe any better and we didn't see any increases when Dyno'd, but the other concern is an oil based filter possibly causing issues with the mass airflow sensor. Nice to see another note addressing this because in many cases the engineers worked hard to maximize the hp in various cars , and gains can be questionable? An interesting note that some items we mod does not always work in every case.
 

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