Yesterday, our friends from CSF Radiators came by our facility at StudioRSR to take an in-depth look at the new 2021 M3's cooling systems. Fortunately besides our own in-house project G80 M3, we also had Mashimarho's G82 M4 in the shop getting ready for our Tesseract G82 Roll Bar to be installed and we were able to visually confirm the front end cooling configuration of the new 6-speed manual G8x M3/M4's.
The current 2021 M3 and 2021 M4's shared S58 power plants making over +400whp and +380wtq to the ground necessitates the maximum efficiency of cooling. While design features need to balance this need for cooling with the aerodynamics, lighting, ducting, and overall design, space is very limited.
As enthusiasts and tuners worldwide continue to squeeze every last bit of horsepower and torque from the BMW S58, this need for cooling becomes even more of a necessity.
Cue CSF Radiators! With over 20 years experience creating the world's most efficient cooling products, CSF's extensive experience in aftermarket performance, especially with BMW's, is un-matched with track-proven results and continued use in numerous record-holding cars and builds.
Their proprietary B-tube technology allows for unsurpassed surface area for heat exchange within these very small spaces without sacrificing the efficiency of airflow. Additionally, many of CSF's cooling products are designed internally to pass through the radiators at least twice, if not, 3x times across. These key features do wonders for cooling as compared to factory radiators which only pass across the radiator once.
As with all air-to-water charge cooling systems, it's imperative that the cooled water inside the intake manifold is as low of a temperature as possible in order to provide a lower intake air temperature. When intake air temperatures rise, the ECU recognizes this higher temperature and compensates for it by adjusting timing and fueling (and lots of other things beyond our current pay-grade), and thusly, creates less horsepower & torque.
In order to provide a more sustainable lower intake temperature throughout various conditions, the front-mounted heat exchanger is crucial in cooling the water that absorbs the heat from the charged air passing through the intake manifold. With cooler water coming from the front mount heat exchanger, the capacity of absorption of heat in the intake manifold increases which means lower IAT's and longer periods of true power and performance.
Will it fit? This was the question of the day besides going over installation procedures and finding out how to take things apart to get to the heat exchanger itself. While we were in there, we also looked at the G80 M3's transmission cooling and auxiliary side coolers. Stay tuned for those!
Once we got the prototype heat exchanger installed, we found that there's fortunately even more room to add rows and even add more thickness to the prototype.
As much as we wanted to run CSF's prototype heat exchanger in our G80 M3 for the weekend's trackday at Sonoma Raceway, we decided it was best to gather baseline temperatures with the original stock heat exchanger.
When we get back from Sonoma, we plan to install the prototype and take it to the track again to get comparative temperature results.
Stay tuned for the stock baseline temperature results and stay up-to-date with developments as we test more and more new parts for the G80 M3 and G82 M4 by following us on:
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