I recently built a sealed FR-S front end to be able to develop some new products and run front downforce studies. The first thing I did was see the gains of running full cooling blockers on the front end. I analyzed these three cases:

OEM front bumper with default center cooling inlet, OEM fog lights with bezel
OEM front bumper with default center cooling inlet, my brake ducts on the fog light bezel
Blocked center inlet and smooth blockers on fog light bezels
Cases ran at 100mph, flow directly in longitudinal direction, stock ride height

What I found was that running full blocking would be a full 47lbs of downforce over the OEM setup. While this is unrealistic because we need center radiator cooling, it shows that there is potential there with some optimization.

While I recommend running brake ducts for much longer pad/rotor/bearing life, there is some easy performance to be had just by removing the factory bezels and smoothing out the inlet with an easy sheetmetal cover.

As for the center, even though the center inlet looks big, the top 1/3 or so is actually fake grill that is covered by the factory inlet. Making an inlet duct from the front bumper that allows full flow into the radiotor/condensor without leakage would allow a portion of this to be blocked while still getting the same CFM. This would also be NASA TT5 legal, which is a class that is very hard to find front downforce.

I ran this study really quickly but if there are any questions or specific cases you guys would like to see, either post below and just send me an email. I’d like this blog to turn into a forum where we could bounce ideas off of each other.

Thanks!