Beat the Heat Pt.3 (Cooling Upgrades for the FK8) Hood Vents

Welcome to part 3 of our beat the heat series for our FK8. In this segment we are going to attach a full set of Trackspec Motorsports hood vents on our stock hood in an effort to help evacuate as much hot air from our engine bay as we can. We have been experiencing some of the hottest ambient air temperatures that these cars have ever seen before now that we are in Vegas and it’s getting more and more crucial that we target areas of improvement to keep temperatures at a consistent level with all these upgrades.

Last post we upgraded to our front mount intercooler system. While THIS IS not so much an upgrade in keeping engine temps down. it made sure that we keep our boost air intake temps lower and makeS sure that we keep making power throughout several hot laps.

In our intercooler post we dug into two types of heat exchangers. Now, let’s dig little more into on how a heat exchanger works. Remember your intercooler, radiator, AC condenser, and more are all just various types of heat exchangers. The intercooler in the FK8 is what’s known as air to air heat exchanger as it uses outside air to cool the boost air. The radiator and A/C condenser are types of air to liquid heat exchangers as its outside air to cool a moving fluid inside the core. Air is technically a fluid but let’s just think of things like water and refrigerant as fluids for this sake.

Regardless of the type of heat exchanger used they both require that an ample amount of air is moving through them in order to remove as much heat as possible. As air moves through the fins in your intercooler the cooler outside air pulls away from it the hotter air that is coming off the core. It then rejects that heat into your engine bay and that is exactly where these hood vents come into play.

Air is coming through the grill then through your radiator, intercooler, oil-cooler, etc, and then straight into your engine bay and that is where the problem lies. As we continue to pump all this hot air into our engine bay it effectively starts to become like a hot air storage tank. We want the hot air to get far away from our heat exchangers. Thermodynamics tells us that heat will always want to travel from hot to cold (in its simplest form) and the greater the delta the more effective our heat transfer is. So it is much easier to move hot air at 120 deg F to a room that is 40 deg F as opposed to a room that 100 deg F. This is because that delta is greater and we reject more heat quicker.

With me so far? Alright good. So when the hot air is getting trapped under our hood the delta between that hot air and the air being rejected from the cooler is less so things start to get warm. In comes those hood vents. The hood vents open up spots in our hood for the hot air to vent out through. It acts as an escape hole for the engine bay heat to get out and increases our overall heat exchange efficiency.

PART BREAKDOWN

Manufacture: Trackspec

Part #: CTRT1HL

Components: T1 center style vent, 2x side vents, mounting hardware

Specs:

• 7” by 22” center hood vent placed above the factory turbo inlet pipe

• 18.6” by 6” side vent

• Shape specific to fit the curve of the OEM Type R hood

• Help reduce underhood pressure

• Cutting of the hood is required

Installation of the hood vents is pretty straight-forward thanks to the templates provided by Trackspec. They give us three nice to scale paper pieces that we can stick to our hood to outline right where we need to cut. They also provide us with the needed rivets to get the job done. The finish on the louvers themselves is very nice; a simple black finish with their logo etched in the corner. As advertised, they fit the body lines of the factory hood very well. We would have liked to see some nicer rivets used as the rivets broke easily and the black finish was quite thin and rubs off just with installing. Thankfully they provided us with more rivets then we actually needed so we had spares to cycle through.

Once the install is complete you can tell the difference pretty quick. Just sitting around in traffic and driving around we could see our temps on average around ~5 deg cooler. When we got on the powerband we could bring the temps down quicker with the hood vents. They have a nice look to them and make the front end of our car look more aggressive.

27WON PRO TIP:

Installation of the hood vents does require drilling and cutting into the hood which is irreversible work. If you are not comfortable cutting into your hood take it to a professional body shop to have the work completed.