The CSF EvoX Racecar Build – Engine, Oiling & Cooling

Engine oiling and engine cooling are no-brainer priorities for any race car build, but these items are ever more important for the 4B11 powered CSF EvoX as one of its goals is to race on the hot desert tracks of Southern California. The number of people who have successfully raced high power EvoXs reliably can probably be counted on one hand, so it is of the upmost importance that we take every precaution and use everything at our disposal to prevent on-track mishaps. In this installment of the CSF EvoX build we will focus on the initial engine build that got the car to SEMA and the foundation we laid down in preparation to keep the 4B11 alive once it starts being pushed to its limits on track.

The 4B11 with its lightweight all-aluminum modern design is not as strong as the tough cast iron 4G63 of prior Evos that had a stiff block, thick ring lands and crank with lots of overlap and journal area. The 4G63 was designed with 80’s crude engineering tools and was overbuilt. “If in doubt, make it stronger!” was the mindset of Japanese manufactures at the time and we loved the performance benefits. With huge jumps in engineering computation power, today’s engines are built strong enough to be totally reliable at stock power levels, and are no longer overbuilt. So when extracting a lot of power from them, great care must be taken.

We cannot do much to increase the integrity of the main structures of the engine, like the head and block castings. The architecture of the block will not allow us to do things to increase bearing area, but we can ensure the bearings have a continuous supply of properly cooled and air-free oil to maximize lubrication. We can also work to keep the coolant temperature under control so our thin wall aluminum block has the best chance to remain dimensionally true to keep clearances correct and maintain a good head seal at high power levels. These factors we can control and we will attack them in this segment of the CSF EvoX build.

As you’ll recall, the CSF EvoX was picked up as a rolling chassis with everything stuffed in a container. The majority of the power steering components we’re unfortunately MIA so the decision was made to ditch the power steering for this first stage of the build. So now we had to find a way to put belts around the water pump, alternator and crank pulley, and also drive the Peterson R4 dry-sump pump that is part of the Magnus Motorsports dry-sump kit.

First, we needed to add an idler pulley to the mix. We need to alter the direction of the belt because it was touching the passenger side engine mount bracket. We would need the belt to take a downward turn in order to avoid the engine mount bracket. We accomplished this by using a stud in one of the engine mount bracket bolt locations and then made this spacer on our lathe to allow us to bolt on an FR-S idler pulley to our new stud.

Driving the Peterson R4 dry-sump pump would be a little trickier since it is offset further outboard than any of the other accessories. The adapter Magnus supplies is meant to work with the stock pulley, but we wanted to retain the ATI Super Damper. We found this dry-sump gear adapter that bolted up to our ATI Super Damper with zero modification at ARE (drysump.com). It was a huge time saver! ARE offers these adapters for many ATI dampers and they will also work with you to ensure you have the exact gear and belt you need for your custom application.

The brackets from Magnus are very nice looking and beefy enough to withstand the rigors of racing, but we must say that we did have to massage them a bit to get everything to articulate and fit correctly. In some places, we had to clearance the brackets so they wouldn’t hit the block.