How Ryco Protects the Gen3 Supercars Engines

As the Official Filtration Partner of the Repco Supercars Championship, Ryco supplies the air, oil, and fuel filters that protect the entire field of Mustang and Camaro Gen 3 Supercars V8 engines. 

As you would expect, the development behind filters for engines of this calibre is second to none and Supercars recently visited our lab in Altona North to find out more.

Ryco’s laboratory is located right here in Australia to test our products according to our country’s unique conditions, making them a perfect fit for Australian race cars. Ryco’s Head Engineer, Alastair Hampton, would explain why the laboratory is an essential component of Ryco’s product development.

Alastair Hampton: “For us, we want to push the boundaries on increasing the longevity of engines as much as we can because with longevity of engines comes good efficiency and low emissions. So for us, it's important for us to really understand filtration, especially in Australian conditions, so that we can maximise that longevity. The only way we can really maximize longevity is with filtration because 70 to 80% of all engine failures is due to wear.

We have a lot of really fine dust in Australia and it's a lot finer than other countries where most vehicles are engineered and developed now. So for us, we really want to tackle that fine dust because we know that's what gets into engines and really shortens engine life.”

Just as Australia has unique conditions, Supercars has unique racing conditions. During the development of Gen 3, one of the key agendas was to increase engine longevity by thousands of kilometres. These new engines are getting close to 10,000km between rebuilds which is a far cry from Larkham’s era where rebuild intervals were close to 1,500km.

Supercars Engine Expert, Craig Hasted, attributes this improvement to high-quality oil and fuel filtration. During an event like the Bathurst 1000, the Supercars are at near-full throttle all day with oil temperatures reaching and staying way hotter than your average road car, making filtration absolutely critical. Alastair Hampton had the following to say about Ryco’s involvement in increasing the longevity of the Gen 3 Supercars engines.

Alastair Hampton: “Supercars really wanted to get that longevity - They wanted to have engines and engine systems that didn't require constant upkeep and maintenance and the only way we could really do that is by keeping the engines extremely clean - much cleaner than what a traditional OEM filter would do.”

As an example, your everyday road car’s fuel filter is generally capable of filtering to around 18 micron. The Ryco Z500RP Fuel Fuel Filter which is used by the Gen 3 Supercars is capable of filtering down to 7 micron. This is because a Supercars fuel filter needs to handle a massive volume of fuel and contamination needs to be avoided at all costs.

Every little bit of contamination that goes through the fuel system and injectors can not only lead to blockage but also create minute amounts of wear that can potentially change the injector holes. Keeping the injectors clean means good fuel atomization for the engines to run efficiently and make maximum power throughout the season without interruption.

Ryco utilises a test rig that pumps dirty fluid through the filter to monitors the amount of particles upstream and downstream of that filter as well as the exact size of each particle that’s being removed from the fluid to give good fractional efficiency.

The same kind of testing is also done on our oil filters. A typical road car oil filter is usually capable of filtering to around 35 to 50 micron whereas the Ryco Syntec Oil Filter utilised by the Supercars is capable of filtering down to 20 micron.

This is because the engines work hard during a race, practically living at 7,500 RPM. At that speed, you can imagine the metal surfaces within the engine sliding past each other extremely rapidly. In these conditions, any contaminant that gets in between those metal surfaces is going to do a huge amount of damage so being able to filter down to as small a particle as possible is a must.

However, with filters that filter to this level, there is a belief within race teams that this creates restrictions. The team at Ryco kept this in mind when developing the Supercars filters, with the Z5000RP Fuel Filter being capable of flowing 400L/hr. Alastair had the following to say about this challenge.

Alastair Hampton: “When we were looking at the program, obviously we knew what longevity we had to achieve which meant we knew the micron that we wanted to hit with a filter. But then, we had this whole issue of flow because we knew that the teams and Supercars wouldn't adopt our filters unless we also created filters that flow better than the incumbent filters that they were using.”

Ryco also has a section of the laboratory dedicated to air filtration, which is critical in the world of Supercars. When a Supercar kicks up dust coming over a curb at 250km/h, you can imagine just how hard an air filter has to work in motorsport conditions. It only takes milligrams of dust being ingested through the air intake to do a lot of damage to an engine and traditionally, racing engines run minimal filtration for the sake of maximum flow, which is detrimental to longevity.

Ryco’s air filtration test rig pulls up to 30,000L/min of air and injects the filter with dust to measure the amount that's being caught, the amount that gets through, and the mass of the dust itself. This allows us to see the number and size of the particles which is the level of accuracy required to develop filters at this level.

The air filter is arguably the most important filter on the engine because that's the first line of defence against contamination. OEM air filters are generally capable of filtering down 8-10 micron which isn’t enough in a motorsport setting where the cars are sitting at high RPMs. The Ryco Air Filter utilised by the Gen 3 Supercars filters down particles below 5 micron whilst maintaining high flow using a special design and media that maximises both flow and efficiency. The honeycomb-like design enables us to get the quantity of media required into the filter with media itself utilising nanofibre technology to get fine filtration performance with massive flow.