Project EVO X, Keeping the engine oil and SST tranny cool!

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When driven on the track the transmission will overheat and put the car into limp home mode limiting its speed until the temperature drops.  It does this in as little as two laps.  This really puts a damper on the fun and cannot be too good for transmission life!  The Nissan GTR which shares the same transmission as the EVOX MR also suffers from the same problem.

We had also removed the stock fog light in front of the factory cooler and built a duct to force air over the cooler from the resulting hole in the bumper.  That helped, but instead of getting into limp mode in 2 laps, it simply gave us more time, extending the fun about two to 4 more laps before the tilt light came on.

The fitting in the drain looked vulnerable to us from impact with low objects.  We decided to space the crossmember down to protect the hose and fitting.  We put washers between the crossmember and frame to lower the crossmemeber.

We also put washers in the rear to lower the back of the crossmember.  Later we will fabricate better spacers but we used washers for now to estimate the thickness of the spacers we will need.

The twin clutch EVO SST transmission requires the use of this expensive Diaqueen synthetic factory fluid.  We changed it after looking at the condition of the filter.  The old fluid looked pretty hammered when we drained it.

To hopefully prevent this issue we decided to design our own auxiliary cooling system.  We wanted to be able to allow the stock cooler to function as designed to prevent overcooling in daily driving but to be able to switch on additional cooling when the need arose.

We first mounted a Setrab 13 row racing oil cooler on top of our bumper brace in the full airflow of our front grill opening.  Howard Watanabe of Technosquare handled the install and fabricated all of the brackets and ductwork needed for this project.  To be able to have switchable cooling we used a Genesis Technologies GC 111 Viton seal pump.  This pump works really well with hot oil transfer and many pro racing teams use it for driveline cooling pumps.

Having a switchable pump means that we can make use of the extra cooling when we need it.  It also ensures that the cooler will have good oil flow.  We suspect that not enough oil flows through the stock oil cooler and when additional coolers are added, the sluggish flow does not cool the transmission fast enough.  We will have plenty of flow capacity.

Technosquare’s Howard Watanabe installs the Earl’s Pro-lite hose on the Swivel Seal fittings.  When working with AN fittings and hose, you have to make sure that the hose is not spinning as you tighten the fitting nut down.  You also have to make sure that the hose is engaging the cutter in the fitting and not getting pushed back.

The cooler is plumbed from the oil drain hole, to the pump, to the cooler and back to the transmission via the oil fill port.  Since transfer of hot lubricant is a mission critical function we used high quality plumbing throughout our project.  For hose we used Earl’s Pro-Lite hose.  This is a tough, high temp multi ply hose that can work up to 500 psi.  Instead of a braided steel jacket it uses a tough braided nylon which allows the hose to be much lighter.  The nylon is also much more supple and less abrasive than braided steel.

For fittings we used Earl’s swivel seal AN fittings.  Earl’s AN fittings have tough forged bodies and a swiveling o-ringed center section that allows for movement without leakage after the hose has been assembled to the fitting.  We also used various Earl’s NPT and other thread to AN adaptor in the install.  This gives us clean, easy to work on and reliable plumbing.

While we were fiddling with all of this we serviced the transmission filter with a new OEM part.  The filter was extremely contaminated and dirty, signs that our transmission was worked hard, even if for only one track day.  The fluid was pretty dirty and hammered looking as well.  We replaced the fluid with new genuine Mitsubishi Diaqueen synthetic transmission fluid especially formulated for the SST transmission.

Hopefully these mods will keep our transmission happy and we can focus on starting up with mods to increase our power!