2018 tuned/tracked VW Golf Sportwagen 104K/4K mid-OCI checkup after 3x track days HPL Euro 5W40

Yes, that's the primary issue, not great in hot weather (here near sea level at least) but I just try to avoid the hot season really, in fall-spring it peforms to my abilities without overheating. That fine line between a daily driven car you take to the track for some fun once in a while and want to maintain it's "daily-ability" and moving more towards a track car that has it's own downsides. Some great MK7 oil cooler info/testing on my buddy's site here...they have their own issues mainly if you don't mount it in the righ tlocation/don't duct out the hot exhaust air it can hammer you power by raising the intake air temps too much. Also, I wonder how cold season oil warm up is impacted.

Yeah, those are issues and more people here struggle with. You can’t run GTI here without radiator oil cooler. But there is a lot of work. Than winter is issue if you don’t have thermostat.
 
Can you remove cowling and other plastic stuff under the hood? Also what about CSF aluminum radiator?
It does nothing based on testing I've seen. Adding a hood vent does provide some relief to the system, again, that datadrivenmqb site has all sorts of testing of these things. CSF radiator...jury is out, really it didn't show any real value in the testing shown by my buddies. Best to add a properly ducted oil cooler that eliminates the factory heat exchanger thus divorcing coolant/oil systems.
 
Yeah, those are issues and more people here struggle with. You can’t run GTI here without radiator oil cooler. But there is a lot of work. Than winter is issue if you don’t have thermostat.
If you have the better style which are fully divorced (eliminates the heat exchanger with the coolant), it becomes even harder to warm the oil in cold weather. Just not a great solution either way.
 
I like the idea of the simpler-to-install oil coolers that basically put the sandwich plate between the oil filter/filter housing. These can have effective thermostats. You end up having to run a different oil filter (canister type) as well as they are messy when changing the oil. They also don't divorce the systems but *may* be the better comprimise for a street car so you can have warmed oil in the cold months. Either way, a duct and where you mount it is important. I could mount mine off to the side where the fog lights would go as mine has been cut open and has a pass-through duct to the wheel well but someone I know tested one there and wasn't getting adequate flow...likely needs some custom ducting to run over there. In front, just need to do what my buddy did and deflect exhaust air down and out the bottom. All a PITA that I don't want to deal with TBH.
 
If you have the better style which are fully divorced (eliminates the heat exchanger with the coolant), it becomes even harder to warm the oil in cold weather. Just not a great solution either way.
Yes. That is why I always tell people to get BMW E82 1 searies as dedicated track car. Those stuff are easy peasy to do it.
VW, Subaru, Honda, Toyota etc. It becomes really expensive to make it work where cooling is critical.
 
Yes. That is why I always tell people to get BMW E82 1 searies as dedicated track car. Those stuff are easy peasy to do it.
VW, Subaru, Honda, Toyota etc. It becomes really expensive to make it work where cooling is critical.
For a dedicated track car, mine/MQB/MK7 is actually pretty terrible hahaha....much better choices out there that are simpler/easier to keep cool/low cost consumables.
 
Can you remove cowling and other plastic stuff under the hood? Also what about CSF aluminum radiator?
Ah on the cowling under the windshield, removing the rubber seal is popular but some folks did some testing and it's a high pressure zone so actually air likely flows under the hood not out. The hood vent is the way but not ready to chop up my hood yet. At some point...hahaha
 
All this discussion....I just ordered my brake pad stash for the remainder of the year and am counting down the days until fall/cooler temps for 5 more track days! 4 @ VIR, 1 @ Summit Point. Think my tires with careful rotation won't cord out for that but may be pushing it.
 
A bit of an update on my UOA dataset. Based on the post in the main PCMO sub-forum with a discussion of LSJR's lastest YouTube video regarding M1 0W40 oils and statistics of what is meaningful or not in a UOA, here are some quick stats on my dataset as I probably have one of the more robust ones here in the BITOGosphere (21 to-date).


I just calc'd stadard deviation of each variable and looked at anything above/below as being worth a note/look.

A few notes:
I just used my best judgement on what to exclude - the orange highlighted cells. These are when the engine was new and the intial drop of the various analytes hadn't been "flushed out" yet, roughly 20K miles but you can see some had dropped to close to average levels after the first change so I kept those in. I didn't include the first change in the viscosity analysis b/c it's a 30 grade best I can tell from the factory. I'm primarly looking at values higher than one standard deviation from the average as something important (red highlight/"bad") but for example cSt 100 being high is better than low so those get a green highlight/"good". Flashpoint being lower than average is "bad" so gets a red lightlight. TBN is related to OCI so left it out. Finally, the HPL oils pose a bit of an issue as they VOA I have done shows ~10ppm Si so I backed out 8 from each (except the 5/8 sample as this was a custom blend David was working on with me and the it only had 8ppm so just backed out 4..again, judgement call). I know some folks are seeing a bit of Al in their VOAs but mine had none - I *think* these are only in the no-VII VOAs? @OVERKILL showed 3 I believe in his Supercar 5W40 which is the same as my Euro but I just left that alone, they seem reasonable to me as-is but maybe a few ppm could come out. Won't change anything.

This is about what I would have flagged without the quick stat analysis and jives with the notes of what would be expected with those issues/repairs/etc. To the question about LSJR being concnered with a slight up-tick in wear metals switch oils/two changes to flush the previous oil out, yeah, 4 ppm variance without a lot of data isn't valuable at all/can't say much to compare two oils...it's just dataset noise. With that said, few will ever have 30 UOAs on a vehicle (30 being a good number you can find for a sample population to use for this kind of analysis) so at some point, you just look at what you have and make a call.


Screenshot 2024-07-20 142810.webp
 
A bit of an update on my UOA dataset. Based on the post in the main PCMO sub-forum with a discussion of LSJR's lastest YouTube video regarding M1 0W40 oils and statistics of what is meaningful or not in a UOA, here are some quick stats on my dataset as I probably have one of the more robust ones here in the BITOGosphere (21 to-date).


I just calc'd stadard deviation of each variable and looked at anything above/below as being worth a note/look.

A few notes:
I just used my best judgement on what to exclude - the orange highlighted cells. These are when the engine was new and the intial drop of the various analytes hadn't been "flushed out" yet, roughly 20K miles but you can see some had dropped to close to average levels after the first change so I kept those in. I didn't include the first change in the viscosity analysis b/c it's a 30 grade best I can tell from the factory. I'm primarly looking at values higher than one standard deviation from the average as something important (red highlight/"bad") but for example cSt 100 being high is better than low so those get a green highlight/"good". Flashpoint being lower than average is "bad" so gets a red lightlight. TBN is related to OCI so left it out. Finally, the HPL oils pose a bit of an issue as they VOA I have done shows ~10ppm Si so I backed out 8 from each (except the 5/8 sample as this was a custom blend David was working on with me and the it only had 8ppm so just backed out 4..again, judgement call). I know some folks are seeing a bit of Al in their VOAs but mine had none - I *think* these are only in the no-VII VOAs? @OVERKILL showed 3 I believe in his Supercar 5W40 which is the same as my Euro but I just left that alone, they seem reasonable to me as-is but maybe a few ppm could come out. Won't change anything.

This is about what I would have flagged without the quick stat analysis and jives with the notes of what would be expected with those issues/repairs/etc. To the question about LSJR being concnered with a slight up-tick in wear metals switch oils/two changes to flush the previous oil out, yeah, 4 ppm variance without a lot of data isn't valuable at all/can't say much to compare two oils...it's just dataset noise. With that said, few will ever have 30 UOAs on a vehicle (30 being a good number you can find for a sample population to use for this kind of analysis) so at some point, you just look at what you have and make a call.


View attachment 231285
A very interesting chart! Many thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Initial observations, your engine really liked the LM Molygen 5w40 and those OCIs; more track days seems to equal more wear metals (my insights are earth shattering, I know).
 
A very interesting chart! Many thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Initial observations, your engine really liked the LM Molygen 5w40 and those OCIs; more track days seems to equal more wear metals (my insights are earth shattering, I know).
Yeah, my take too however the Molygen never stayed in-grade and had some of the worst grade-drop out of all the oils. Has extra Mo and W so maybe that does actually reduce wear..hard to say. Definitely track use increases wear which makes sense. I dig it but LM aficionados will tell you it's not as high-quality of an oil as their "flagship" Euro oil the Leichtlauf High Tech.
 
Yeah, my take too however the Molygen never stayed in-grade and had some of the worst grade-drop out of all the oils. Has extra Mo and W so maybe that does actually reduce wear..hard to say. Definitely track use increases wear which makes sense. I dig it but LM aficionados will tell you it's not as high-quality of an oil as their "flagship" Euro oil the Leichtlauf High Tech.
true, but it looks like the LM only got really beat up when you a) took it past 6K miles (with 2 track days) or b) put MoS2 in it.

Even so, the wear metals were fantastic.

Correlation isn't causation obviously, but that's just what I see.
 
true, but it looks like the LM only got really beat up when you a) took it past 6K miles (with 2 track days) or b) put MoS2 in it.

Even so, the wear metals were fantastic.

Correlation isn't causation obviously, but that's just what I see.
The difference I think is primarily that I wasn't really tracking it much back then AND when I did I was "slow" and not really pushing it like I can now with ~4 years experience on track. Maybe that "MFC - Molecular Friction Control" w/tungsten really does work!
 
Yeah, those are issues and more people here struggle with. You can’t run GTI here without radiator oil cooler. But there is a lot of work. Than winter is issue if you don’t have thermostat.
This is a buddy's track-dedicated MK7 Golf R. The R's have 1 or 2 (depending on if it has a DSG or manual trans) smaller auxillary radiators up in the front along the sides in front of the fender wells for additional cooling capacity. He has a stick so nothing on the left/driver side. He just rigged up this cooler...I'd like to eventually do this but on my right side. He is putting together a duct for it to funnel the air through it and is using the Iabed oil cooler which divorces the oil from the cooling system; deletes the factory heat exchanger. He doens't use this on the street so getting oil up to temp isn't a concern like it will be for me. It's a bit involved to install; have to remove the intake manifold and water pump I believe and bolts in place of the factory exchanger, I would 100% do this and maybe there is a thermostatic way to help it heat up quicker.

449771800_10123034976634110_6546614123898608638_n.webp


Screenshot 2024-07-23 160608.webp
 
This is a buddy's track-dedicated MK7 Golf R. The R's have 1 or 2 (depending on if it has a DSG or manual trans) smaller auxillary radiators up in the front along the sides in front of the fender wells for additional cooling capacity. He has a stick so nothing on the left/driver side. He just rigged up this cooler...I'd like to eventually do this but on my right side. He is putting together a duct for it to funnel the air through it and is using the Iabed oil cooler which divorces the oil from the cooling system; deletes the factory heat exchanger. He doens't use this on the street so getting oil up to temp isn't a concern like it will be for me. It's a bit involved to install; have to remove the intake manifold and water pump I believe and bolts in place of the factory exchanger, I would 100% do this and maybe there is a thermostatic way to help it heat up quicker.

View attachment 231875

View attachment 231874
That set up will definitely work.
But I would do a thermostat at any cost. Something like this:
 
That set up will definitely work.
But I would do a thermostat at any cost. Something like this:
Agreed.
 
The FCP Euro car keeps that rubber seal.View attachment 232239View attachment 232241
Yes b/c it doesnt' do a thing removing it, it lets air back in b/c the windshield above it is a high pressure zone based on the testing I've seen. These are ineresting cars, I've seen one at an event, note the intercooler is mounted up to vs. in between the condensor and radiator. Uses a stock radiator and the IC is from an Audi - that hood vent gets rid of that hot exhaust air out of the IC it looks like. No external oil coolers. Mild power, only around 300whp. They have some sort of catch can/PCV plate system. Also note...Liquimoly for all the haterz here on BITOG :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO: .
 
Back
Top