Radiator fans or not? (Page 1 of 2)

Better still, keep the factory thermostatic control over the fan or if you don't trust that, just hardwire them on.  Drivers forget things.

There will come a time when you find yourself in an extended slow full-course yellow, if not a full-stop red flag.

Fans are heavy. Pull them out.

My "Real" race car has no fan.
My Lemons car, like one other good suggestion, has the mechanical fans removed, and the two electric, theromstatically controlled fans retained.... Most of these Lemons need a fan, and there is lots of low speed, low airflow conditions that require it. Many Lemons are also marginal on cooling to begin with, so if that is suspect, get a bigger rad....

Electric fan wired to a relay/switch or even the ignition is the best option. You for sure need something. We just leave our fan on all the time because you're always slowing down for yellows and it's a pain to remember to turn it on/off.

Our car turns the fans on to low speed above 200 degrees and turns it off above 25 mph.  Unless the AC is on or it is above 208 then it stays on high speed until 35 mph.

Aren't computers fun...

We hot wired it after it boiled over in the last race, turns out the problem was the P.O. removed the thermostat entirely leaving the bypass open and shortcutting the radiator.

NOS cools the intake charge, and clearly that would cool the engine.  Sell your cooling system and spend the bucks on a bottle.  Cooler and faster.

Its the principle of it!

Actually, it surprises me how many want to change or modify perfectly good systems without appreciating the potential consequences. If folks want to actually finish, they should focus on reliability and weight reduction and not mess with critical systems unless there is some demonstrated need to do so. Our Celica ran hot, but that's only because it was a lemon! Fan's and radiators didn't seem to help... must have been that thin oil... hmmm.

This also works very nicely in the 928 Estate....  we only run the little AC secondary fan wired to a temp switch (stock) in the radiator...turns on around 195F....  but on track it doesn't run....  it will kick on once you come in the pits....

most serious race cars only have small fans that are used in the pits or maybe under a slow caution lap....

The fans out of BMW E23s move hurricane quantities of air and are cheap at Pick-N-Pull, but they probably draw 20 amps.

WTH? Parasitic losses? I'll bet most teams could lose more weight by knocking off the Doritos than they'll save by gutting the cooling fans....what is this fascination for tinkering with good stock systems? I had a friend who raced specials in the road racing scene up here in the 60's....almost never had a DNF....with a SBC powered A-H....he used to use only parts that were supplied through GM's competition catalog. He used to tell me that there were so many things that could go wrong and that for an extra five bucks for that cam, you buy a zillion hours of dyno/development time and the brains of of hundreds of engineers....yet everybody is smarter than the OEM engineering team. I learned this in high school when I regularly got clobbered by a guy with a 283-powered Nova....My 400 SBC should have walked away with cam/headers/intake/Holley, but he balanced/blueprinted the 283, gasket-matched the ports and ran a Q-Jet. I'd buy the next goodie out of Car Craft but never changed the plug wires. He made lots of money and never broke. Why do we always want to reinvent the wheel?

Our stock electric fan was toast, so I bought a cheapo electric fan from eBay for $20-something. It was much lighter than the stock electric fan. Wired it into the thermostatic switch on the radiator AND added a manual turn on switch. Runs cool as a cucumber and I don't have to worry about the clutch fan smashing into the radiator. Then again, I do have to worry about the fan getting crunched in a front end wreck, but we still have the big diving board bumpers and two "bash bars" behind the grille to protect it.