Project SC300 Road Racer: Part 26 – It’s Getting Hot in Here, so Chillout!
When we left the SC300 we had the body kit completely installed and then were off to the alignment shop.
For More on Project SC300 Check this out!
The trash panda was now aligned and ready. But: holy swamp-ass, Batman! Georgia is H-O-T in the summer. And with all of that Sabelt safety gear that I purchased from Pegasus Auto Racing, it was downright sauna-like in the race car. When the ambient temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit and the track temp is well into the triple-digits, it doesn’t matter that you’re in a race car with all those holes that Tom drilled and the windows open – it’s brutal.
Cooling shirts have been on the market for quite some time now, but they all rely on the same premise: use a pump inside of a literal cooler to circulate ice water around. However, technology has caught up with this market and now we have electro-mechanical coolers that are compact enough and rugged enough for motorsports use. Enter Chillout Systems
The Chillout Systems Quantum Cooler is an iceless system. It circulates an actual non-toxic coolant through the same type of shirts/clothes that other systems do. Except that’s all there is – this electronic box and some tubes. Requiring no ice, this driver cooling system is completely maintenance free, using an electronic rotary micro-compressor that uses 1.75 oz of coolant in a sealed system.
The Quantum Cooler is just like an air conditioner in your house, except everything is in this box. And, instead of the evaporator having air passed over it, the liquid coolant that you fill the system with passes over the evaporator. The system is capable of chilling the coolant to an electronically-limited minimum of 35F. That’s cold enough to nearly freeze your important parts.
In certain applications, you might have the cooler in the trunk. It just depends on your vehicle. Could you go longer by doubling-up hoses? Probably! But the 6′ hose was plenty for me because I ended up mounting the unit right behind the driver seat — since I still may have passengers/instructors from time to time, I figured that was a good place for it.
I happened to purchase a “Version 1.5” unit from Chillout Systems. These have some updated internals, but don’t come with a priming tube. I’ll explain what the priming tube is for soon — chill out.
HA HA HA
1 comment
That’s cool, but not $2500 cool. Damn! The collective sum of all my winter upgrades will come in comfortably south of that. Hopefully the price comes down as the tech matures.