Oiling system improvements
Oiling..... The Achilles heel of the FA20. Poor oil pressure and flow has been the cause of many a dead FA20 whether it was bone stock or highly modified.
There are a lot of underlying reasons for this but with some choice porting of oil galleries, oil intakes, modification of the oil pump cover its self, a much better flowing Killer B oil pickup pipe and a Cusco sump baffle along with a thicker oil we can achieve some huge improvements.
For reference a log Abbey Motorsport took years ago on a bone stock engine shows the oil pressure on 0w30 at 95c looking like this
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It shows the oil pressure dropping rapidly after 5500rpm down to 5.5bar by 7400rpm. We have seen these results consistently on healthy engines, as these engines start to get a little older, a little more worn out, missed services and poor quality oil these results get even worse and cause accelerated wear to the bearings and eventually failure.
After lots of internal modifications and using a thicker viscosity Millers Nanotec oil we have managed to achieve 7.8bar of oil pressure at 7800rpm with no drop off as RPM increases!
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Even with oil temperatures of 120c we are not seeing the oil pressure drop any lower than 7bar at over 7000rpm.
This is using standard Toyota main and conrod bearings and a completely standard oil pump, I am using a Fluidampr crankshaft pulley to help lower crankshaft harmonics to keep the oil pump alive at these high RPMs as an extra safety net.
Fun fact we also use stock oil pump gears in our 600bhp GT86R race car with a lightweight alloy pulley that is regularly revved very high proving that harmonics in these engines is not a big issue but it never hurts to over engineer these things!
Speaking of 120c oil temps....Time to fit that Avo oil cooler
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Happy to report it is working fantastic. We were seeing oil temps getting up to 110c on a 1st through to 3rd pull which is pretty quick! Now we can do a 1st to 6th under full boost and only see 96c oil temps with only a 2c climb over the entire pull which is fantastic!
Accusumps:
The above mods will make a big difference but they still won't be enough in a very hard driven high grip / high downforce race car with grippy tires. On our GT86R which used 295 wide Toyo 888R tyres we still found some oil pressure drop on some brutal high G chicanes or long sustained cornering so we also fitted an Accusump.
The Accusump increases the total oil capacity and releases the stored extra oil when it sees a pressure drop. Some people will scoff at Accusump saying you have to dry sump and that's perfectly fine if you have the funds required.
Our GT86R sprint car is still on the exact same engine which was fitted back in 2015! Granted it doesn't do lots of miles but those that it does do are extreme!
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Adrian Smith
Hi Nick, thanks for your comment, I’ve updated the blog post to explain we do use Accusump in our race car. The original article was written by Tom and the tests were carried out on a very hard abused road car, cheers Adrian :)
Nick
Hi Tom,
Could you elaborate on the internal modifications done to maintain oil pressure at high RPM. Was there any consideration to providing sufficient capacity for sustained throttle-on turning?
An issue I’ve faced is at high RPM (maximum oil flow), during a continuous long corner, the oil pressure drops enough to cause bearing damage. I suspect this is due to over-pumping the oil towards the heads, which cannot easily return during a sustained corner. This leaves insufficient oil in the sump and the pump running dry. From my understanding the only real band aid to this is something like an Accusump to buy you a few seconds to make it through the corner.
Would love to go into more depth on this