Here's my .02

I run my oil cooler up in front of the radiator. If your engine temps go up now, you need a new radiator or at least clean your radiator out. Remember, the AC cooler used to be in front of the radiator and that covered the whole radiator. An oil cooler only covers about 1/6 of that. You also need the 2 rubber side gaskets and the curved plastic piece at the top of the radiator that came stock on every car. These items make the air go through the radiator instead of around it.

If your mounting the oil cooler inside the headlight bucket, you have to get air flow to push through the cooler and I don't see that happening behind the body work. There's not enough force behind the incoming air. You'll need to install a fan on it to get oil temps down.

Mine is about the same setup as Jim's with some metal cut although I'm not sure how much. Unfortunately I won't be able to access my car until after Christmas to measure.

I have a new turbo radiator in my car and mounting the cooler in front of the radiator in my car caused the water temps to go marginal. Moving it out of the way lowered temps to where I have no concern.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Tyler's car had a Setrab similar to mine with about the same or more metal cut out. Nearly every car out here has a big oil cooler on the right side of engine bay and some metal has to be removed to fit it. We're talking 1 LB of metal and additional drag. Zero performance advantage. Why is this suddenly an issue?

It's only an issue because it was recommended by NASA that we put a number on this when they reviewed the rules draft. While I understand that it's good practice in rules to define things as much as possible (and that is the intention of the national offices recommendation), I can see that this is making a big deal out of something that not neccessary.

I will go back to Will, and try to push through the origional "minimum neccessary" wording. While it's vague, it seems better than over-regulating this.

Edit: Email was sent today. Will was out of the office last week. he is back today. Hopefully he is not too backed up, and we will get this done soon.

Thanks Eric. I think this would be a big deal for the entire west coast race group.

Update - Will got back to me already (catches up quickly!). We have the OK to go back to the "minimum neccessary" wording in the first draft. This is just to put a lid on extorting this rule for large scale unibody modifications. The specific size limitation is gone.

To be clear, this is for the oil cooler specifically, and does not apply to ram air. The ruling outlawing cutting holes in the unibody for ram air stays.

The only thing we are waiting on is getting the picture of the "Ken bracket" into the rules. The rules drafts are in an RTF format, so I need NASA to do this on the back end.

FWIW, I had my oil cooler in front of the radiator for a long time but deep in the summer my water temps ran high(per the factory gauge). I put an oil temp gauge in and saw some high numbers as well. I moved it to the right side, buggered up a nice big hole, much bigger that 4 inches and still had high temps. We moved the cooler forward a bit to help the air from getting packed in behind it, put a two hole scoop in the turn signal and one hole scoop in the foglight hole, ran some brake cooling hoses to the cooler and now I can barely get to 210 degrees even on a 100+ degree day! I still run the factory water temp gauge for now but it generally runs in the middle in the summer unless I'm right up behind someone