Markus

<I>another question from the weird and wonderful world of Markus™</I>

Could you dry sump a scooby, if so then how? how much would it cost. What benefits does it give? what disadvantages are there.

is there any point?

are the WRC cars dry sumped?

Davvers

There are 2 main advantages in dry sumping - it allows you to run a lower ride height with some cars - the boxer lay out already allows this and is going to be of little advantage in a Subaru.
It also protects against oil surge where oil is slung up the wall of the sump resulting in the possibility of the oil pick up sucking up air instead of oil - this can obviously have disasterous circumstances.

I have a K engined Caterham which is dry sumped, it needs to so it can run the low ride height - and also protects from oil surge - particularly as its now in a N-S configuration when the engine was originally designed to be run transverse.

If you get under the Subaru you will see it has a very deep and square sump pan - it also has a centrally located oil pickup which is baffled - it is a pretty good design to prevent oil surge already.

I run both cars on slicks and the only car that has had problems with oil starvation is the Caterham as the engine really is at its developmental limits.

To fit a dry sump to the subaru would involve a great deal of work I would imagine - you would need to arrange for a scavenge pump to extract the oil from the sump bottom to a seperate oil reservoir - the engine bay is already pretty full.

To sum up, unless you are managing to get amazing G forces around long corners (eg Gerrards at Mallory) I would imagine that it would not be required - you can however buy a more baffled sump and I believe some of the rally teams run these - I have no idea of WRC use.

All IMHO of course!
Having been on many many track days I have never seen a Subaru suffer from terminal oil starvation due to cornering forces

[This message has been edited by Davvers (edited 05 July 2001).]