Yesterday I watched an episode of Matts Off Road Recovery (southern Utah) where he was going over his fleet of vehicles and touching on their shortcomings. When it came to his XJ jeep with a inline 6 in it he talked about the fan and the hood louvers. He said that he had tried every electric fan that was highly touted as the answer to a changeover from mechanical to electric, Including the Ford/Lincoln fans that everyone talks up.
He said all the electric fans failed in that application and he kept going back to the mechanical fan for his XJ with A/C. He said no matter the ambient temp he never has to stop and let the vehicle cool down with a mechanical fan like he did when testing the electric fans. I thought it was a good apples to apples test under extreme conditions that in his application he had never been able to use an electric fan without the vehicle overheating. When he switched back to mechanical fans the problem was non existent.
He issued a $10,000 challenge that if anyone had an electric setup that could cool in southern Utah and they could prove it didn't overheat, he'd give them $10,000. Putting his money where his mouth is........
Just for an observation, I've never seen any closed course race cars with electric fans used to cool them, always mechanical fans. i did see one autocross car many years ago with an electric fan that failed miserably after only a lap around the course.
Probably a little known trick to cool oval track cars down during a red/yellow flag was a water reservoir using a washer pump to squirt water over the core of the radiator while bringing the RPM up, works very well under extreme conditions. The water and air mixture together, will pull a lot more heat from the core than just air will.
