Wouldn't it have been nice (oil cooler question)

[Paul Franssen]

OK, Porsche set up this system where they have a couple of copper tubes piping oil to and from a radiator mounted up front in the car. In passing through the inner rocker panel, this is at the origin of causing condensation and rust there, and of course those copper pipes are expensive, can be crushed by wrong carlift procedures, etcetera...
I wonder if it would have been a good engineering solution to use the rear wing as an oil cooler? I appreciate, lots of Porsches don't have the wing, but from a purely engineering point of view, it would (to me, a non-engineer) seem to have been an elegant solution...
Or not?

[Wil Ferch]

No....mounted in the rear wing means:
-- mounted high, bad center-of-gravity
-- more importantly....waste heat gets sucked into the engine intake.

perhaps more elegant would have been to retain some of the goodness of the original "long-hood" design, where there was a clear shot of air through a small grill to the fender mounted front oil cooler. The 74+ bumper cars have this ridiculous "notch" cut out on the underside ( ! ) of the bumper....works well when travelling 200 kmh...but does little otherwise.

By the way, the tubing used is brass....not copper...but I get the point.

The tubing itself could have been finned like Chuck Mooreland's design.

---Wil

[Wil Ferch]

Ohhh.....another point in the opposite direction.....

It seems the SC/RS limited production run model of 1983-84 actually did this very thing...had the oil cooler under the wing where presumably the A/C condensor would sit. Interesting.......

---Wil