scramblr

I'd be interested in hearing/learning how a different oil pan frees up hp. Thx...

vsop

A diffrent oil pan does not free up HP. The aluminum ones can drop a few lbs, but you make up the weight with more oil capacity. They are mostly for road racing/endurance runs where the larger oil cap helps keep oil temps more stable and under large G forces the oil pump does not run dry. The Ford GT and Z06 have dry sumps for this reason.

Now to get more HP a windage tray scrapes the oil off the crank and keeps it from splashing up onto it. This reduces drag on the crank and on a car with out one putting one on has given a 10-15hp bump. Now our stangs have one stock, but how good it is I do not know. I do know when I have my new engine built I will probably have a larger cap aluminum pan with an aftermarket windage tray installed. Since I will be going with turbos the extra oil cap is highly beneficial.

retfr8flyr

I will be installing the Canton pan and tray when I do my TT install but I am going with steel not aluminum. In the past I have had too many aluminum pans end up with holes in from driving on the street.

Earl

vsop

When I add the new block and TT the car will no longer be a DD.. It will see limited street use and mostly track and strip time, so I'm not as worried about it getting beat up from the street. I will be more worried about my HRE Comps not being bent from potholes..
Up north I would not even try running HRE Comps on the street.

steelcomp

Look into the term "kick out" and tell me a different pan dosen't"free up"hp. Like everything else in the upper eschalons of racing, there's a lot of "unknowns" about pans here in magazine land. Do you know why a dry sump is preferable? Do you know how one works?
I can tell you this, as well. All you 1/4 mi. guys want a free tenth at the track?? Take out a quart of oil before you run. There's free hp right there.

steelcomp

There are high and low pressure areas in the crankcase, depending on several factors. A well designed pan, (mostly for drag racing) has what's called a "kick out"...an area created to enhance the low pressure area ofthe crankcase, basically increasing it's volume in that low pressure area. More volume in the crankcase, more area for expansion, and less internal pressure. This helps direct the oil away from the crank (known as windage) into this low pressure area and reduces a lot of friction. With the Y block, I'm not sure how the kickout is designed, as I haven't seen one yet. This isn't new in oil pans, just not something you're going to see on your typical street or even many race engines. A good kickout steel pan is around $600.00,and a good alum. one is near a grand. The kickout is mostly limited by chassis dimensions or other physical restrictions, although NASCAR has it's limitations in rules regarding pans. This has nothing to so with wet or dry sump, either. Both systems can take advantage of a kickout design.

vsop

You realize just about every performance oil pan/windage tray setup hassome sort ofkick out sump design . Most performance engines actually have stock setups that do pretty good these days.

I would be more intrested in the baffling one way flow. Starving my engine of oil on cornering or hard braking is my main focus.
I have not checked the stock windage tray & oil pan to see if dropping the oil level will really help. If it does its job then I bet you would not see much of a gain, unless you had enough power to lift the wheels off the ground

steelcomp

You realize that I'm not talking about the sump design?
Don't take my word for the quart of oil thing...if you've never tried it, then you're just guessing. I'm not. With my last engine, a $1000 oil pan...the best made, best baffling and windage system, a quart of oil cost 28 hp. That had nothing to do with the windage tray, and that was on a dyno. Not much bouncing off the ground there.

scramblr

Thanks for the responses guys...

F1Fan

Hi steelcomp,

The trick is to find a reasonable compromise between power and potential to expose the pump pickups. It can take a lot of work to get the oil to drain back as quickly as you want it to especially when there are cornering forces that potentially could trap oil that would normally drain back to the pan quickly. I'm sure that 28bhp is worth lowering the oil level for but how do you know if there is always going to be enough oil in the sump if you are running a wet sump withoutlowering the level until the oilpressure goes a way at high RPM high-G conditions? At least with the wet sumps you can monitor the oil tank level, with a wet sump it seems to me like you're runing the dark unless you are runing it with apan with some sort of asight port onthe pan.

In the distant past I had pick up problems with an apparently less than optimumcustomfab'ddry sump pan on a 911 that was autoX'd and later road raced andI couldn't figure out what was wrong with the oiling system when turning rightuntil we had to replace the pan with an off the shelf pandue to damage from road trash (some poor guys BBS 3-piece wheel parts!),and it went away magically. Since then I've just stayed with the parts that other people were using and I know work right. I can't afford $20K engine rebuilds anymore which is partlywhy I'm playing witha much cheaper S197GT Mustang now.

Cheers