 When designing aftermarket parts, in order to make the highest quality, fabrication skills aren't really the only thing that matters. The ability to gather feedback from the car in the process is just as important. So today we'll grab a couple engineers and we're going to look at a system we've designed in-house that helps a lot with the design and testing process for some of our past and future parts. We'll start with my buddy Jimmy to learn more. All right, we've got our RS here today, this is going to be our guinea pig. You can see it's got our carbon fiber intake on it, it's got an access port of course. What's not out yet is what's kind of tucked underneath here. We've got a front mount intercooler that we're testing and that's the subject for the day. Jimmy, tell us, there's obviously some things that customers won't have on their car if they buy it from Ford and put our stuff on it. Run me through the setup that you have on here for testing right now. Sure, absolutely. So kind of later on in the design process, one of our calibrators wanted to get some feedback from the system itself while he's doing the OTS maps. What we've done here is we've put a data logger on that we can get sensor data from various points along the intake tract that he can see in real time while he's actually tuning the car. What locations do you have the sensors on? So right now we've got them set up in four different points. We've got kind of an ambient sensor location that's in the air box and the inlet to the radiator. Then we've got the intake, so just the tube between the filter and the compressor inlet. Then we've got between the compressor inlet and the inlet to the intercooler. And then we've got kind of post-cooling after the intercooler before the throttle body. Okay. And these, just to make sure we're clear, these are all sensors that we put on just for testing. These won't be on the parts when you buy them and put them on your car and they're separate from the sensors that Ford's already got because of course we've got pressure sensors and the ability to measure airflow just from the factory. But this is just for testing. Tell me in more detail about each part and what you used, why you decided to use those parts and what the benefit is. Sure. So kind of as a baseline we need to get ambient pressure and temperature and I'll show you those sensors that we used. So this is just a kind of an off the shelf pressure sensor that allows us to check pressure incoming into the air box. So that's just the world pressure. We've got an intake temperature sensor that we've mounted inside of a copper tube. This one is just the ambient but the rest of them have an additional functionality that allows us to set the position of the sensor within the tube itself because if you get closer to the wall you know you don't really get an accurate reading of the bulk flow. So it's adjustable to make sure that you're getting the most useful information? Absolutely. And all four locations are using the same sensors? They are. Okay. To deploy to other platforms. Yeah, and that's the thing. We're looking at an RS today but this kit is meant for use over and over for every car we support. It's not just a forward thing, right? That's right. Awesome. That's right. So obviously on the dyno when a calibrator from Cobb is making off the shelf maps it's obviously helpful for him to have a lot of data that helps him know what he needs to tweak with timing or boost control but you're a mechanical engineer, you're not a tuner but obviously this guy, this helps you guys when you're designing parts talk a little more about that and what the benefit is aside from calibration. Absolutely. So this allows us to validate both in process as we're doing design and on the back end to make sure that the designs we're putting out are actually providing a good performance gain and really how much we might have left on the table or not. Are we really getting everything we can out of that specific design? So for instance you'll see when John shows you later on on the data we can kind of estimate what the actual efficiency of that intercooler is and see that it doesn't drop off with many gear pulls as the stock one might. Speaking of the stock one do we test this stock or we just test on our own parts? We absolutely test this stock. We need that baseline to validate or to ensure that we are actually making a performance improvement over the base. Awesome. Well that's a good rundown. I think next thing we need to grab John who's our calibrator take this puppy slapping on the dyno and then we get to see the other side of the benefit of this system so thanks a lot man. Fantastic. Thank you. You can see we've got the car on the dyno now and this is John Hebble. He's an R&D calibrator. He's going to take a couple minutes and tell us a little bit about how the calibration team can use the same sensor kit that we talked to Jimmy about to give hard parts a little more feedback to help design the parts even better. So show me what we've got on the screen here. So right now we've got a few parameters from the access port which we logged which is RPM manifold absolute pressure and load actual and then we've got our eight custom sensors that we put on the car for pressure and temperature and then we have custom math channels from these eight pressure sensors that help us further interpret the data. So the information at the top is data that the access port can really provide anybody but this section here is where we get into the custom kit and this is information that most of it you wouldn't have if it wasn't for what we just talked about with Jimmy right. Yeah the biggest thing really that we were looking at especially with the intercooler and the intake is the pressure delta and the temperature delta across the intercooler. And then the bottom these are taking that information and then you've done some custom setups in order to give you a little more information that's more specific to the changes between stock and aftermarket right. So tell me specifically what's valuable here. So this red line here is intercooler efficiency. The top line is the cobb intercooler and the bottom line is the stock intercooler and as you can see during a second third fourth gear pole this is taken at the top of the fourth year pole and the efficiency of our intercooler is 95 percent or just under and the stock one is about 76 percent. Kind of amazing how much the intercooler pulls out how much temperature it pulls out because you're you know you're talking about 283 degrees of compressor outlet temperature after the air comes in gets compressed it gets heated and then as it goes through the intercooler you're dropping down to 92.8 degrees and there's an ambient temperature of just 90 degrees. And it's not even cold outside it's pretty warm to begin with so it's going to make a huge difference for people that are in you know warm climates or that are racing the car doing things where they're you know they're not just commuting to work every day. So in summary really what we're doing is we're adding some extra sensors on the car that Ford doesn't provide. What that does is gives the engineering team extra information so they can start with the baseline then they can make a prototype someone like John can test it on the dyno give some feedback then we can just keep doing that until we end up with the best part possible as opposed to just something that might be better than what you got from Ford or any other car that we support. How does that sound to you John? Sounds pretty good. All right guys that's all the time we've got today but we'll keep you updated as we keep working on the project. John thanks for your time we'll see you later. Absolutely.