Oil Tank, Cooler & Radiator

Every good dry sump needs to be paired with a properly sized Oil tank.  Sizing an oil tank is not just about the amount of oil it can hold but having enough height to ensure that the car cannot out corner the tank with centrifugal forces pulling oil away from the drain.  If an oil tank is too short, you can starve the oil drain like you can in wet sump pick up in an oil pan.

The problem with a taller tank that can hold a few gallons of oil is there is not many locations you can mount in a compact sports car.  To date, we have seen most S2000 dry sump oil tanks placed in trunks.  This means running around 8 feet of oil lines each way.  This extreme length will add noticeable weight and cost to the system and will need more oil  to keep the system full.  It would be possible to mount the oil tank in passenger area if never want to have passengers again, but then you have a hot oil tank in the cabin with you defeating some of the value of a firewall.  C7 Corvettes mount their oil tank in one of the front fender areas, but S2000 are not as bloated as Corvettes and don’t have enough room there.

Our mechanic, John Wallace, had a great idea to mount the oil tank in the radiator compartment.  There is about 7” of depth between the front of the chassis and the cross member and about 19” in height.  That gives us the ability to support 2+ gallon tank.  As far as taking away radiator surface area, the right-hand side of the radiator get little water flow and provides little cooling.

From there we thought anyone needing a dry sump is likely running an oil cooler so we wanted to see if we can integrate that as well.  This would reduce the surface area of the radiator even more, so we needed to make sure we could find the most efficient radiator core possible.  We were introduced to Power Cool Systems through a fellow S2K racer and part designer.  PCS happen to make oil tanks, oil coolers and radiators.  The have an ultra-efficient 2” thick, 3 chamber radiator core that solved the infamous C7 Z06 cooling issues on track.  Even with an oil tank taking out 7” off the side of the radiator and oil cooler taking 4” off the bottom, we are still able to cool up to 800 HP motors with PCS ultra-efficient core.

A few months of back-and-forth design, tweaks and test fitting we were able to produce a 3 in 1, 2+ gallon Oil tank w/ breather, oil cooler and ultra-efficient radiator core capable of supporting 800 HP and drop into the OEM radiator location.

The price is about the same as you would pay for a quality and high-capacity radiator, quality oil cooler and quality oil tank.  Any savings we were hoping for was offset by customizing all 3 systems.  There is the convivence of having everything integrated and working with each system vs on top of one another. A large 16” fan is included and the system is modular so we can replace a radiator or oil cooler individually as needed.

The biggest benefit of this system for dry sumps is that it minimizes all the oil lines that need to be run.  Each oil line is less than 2 feet and some about 1 foot.  Less risk of lines catching on something, less line cost and weight and less oil needed to support the system.