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Driving a car on track can be taxing, and in warmer months and in warmer cars, it can overheat your body. We sometimes poke fun at these in-car issues, but they are real. Some track drivers have to deal with more heat than others, and we have seen many racers in hotter climates skip events in the Summer months. I made the meme below to counter act this "take summers off!" thinking for Texas racers.
Many of you reading this are track junkies who, like us here in Texas, live in climates that can get hot enough to become too taxing to the human body in road course racing. So let's talk about our absolute FAVORITE way to stay cool in a track car - with ICE WATER running through a vest or shirt!
CRYOTHERAPY FOR MOTORSPORTS
Cryotherapy, also known as cold therapy, is the local use of low temperatures in medical therapy. Cryotherapy may be used to treat a variety of tissue, joint or muscle problems - especially post surgery. This usually involves some sort of wrapping around a part of the body with cold water pumped through to affect tissues in a localized area. These medical devices were eventually applied to Motorsports to create "driver cooling" systems.
These are used in a race car (or in the racing pits, as shown above with a portable system) to keep a driver's core body temperature cooler. Very cold water is pumped through a shirt (usually) with capillary tubes, and that cools the blood in your chest - the internal cooling system of the human body. That makes the blood going to your muscles and BRAIN cooler, which reduces fatigue, promotes better driver reactions, allows a wider range of view (perception), and less chance of getting heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
And while many of the track regulars like to brag about the heat not affecting them... as you step up your safety game and start wearing a 2-3 layer fire suit, and/or as your track car becomes more of a gutted race car (with no insulation at the firewall or floor to hot things nearby), getting overheated can become a real issue.
Which is why this post is in our "safety gear" section of our forum - because at a certain point, this becomes a safety concern. But for those more competitive folks, it DOES help mental acuity, and can make you drive faster and more reliably. It's a driving hack that anyone can exploit!
JUST RUN YOUR CAR'S A/C? NOPE
Some of you reading this that have never done a track event might think, why can't I just turn on my air conditioner while driving on track? While these systems works great at keeping the interior of your car cool while driving on the street in even the hottest climates, it does not work well when driving on track.
Almost all modern cars have an automated shut-off for the air conditioning compressor when you mash the throttle wide open. This is a safety feature common on all internal combustion engines since the 1990s, to keep abrupt changes in engine RPM from destroying the electro-magnetic clutch that is used to engage and disengage the compressor.
Most track drivers on most tracks are driving at at Wide Open Throttle for 50-70% of a lap, so the air con is turned off most of the time. Also, to be effective even in those 30-50% of the time periods on track where it could kick on and cool, the windows would have to be up. Strangely enough, some IMSA pro / GT series where OEM air con is used, to keep the drivers cool. They mandate that the cars MUST run the air con on and windows up. Again, this is the exception and not the rule.
WINDOWS DOWN ON TRACK
Driving on track with your windows up and the A/C blasting doesn't work for most of us, as we have to run windows down at any HPDE, W2W, or Time Trial that I know of. That allows the drivers to give clear point-bys (sticking your arm out thew window to point another driver by).
Windows down running also gives corner workers better access if a driver is in an incident, and stuck inside the car or otherwise incapacitated. In rare cases some HPDE groups allow windows up, but only if it is raining HARD, and you have turn signals to communicate point by signals.
With the windows down, running the A/C does almost nothing. Test it yourself - drive around on a hot summer day with your windows down and and the air con blowing on max - it does almost nothing once you are above speeds of about 10 mph. And for some of us, the air con was ditched in our race cars long ago, for weight savings and better engine cooling.
ENDURANCE RACING
In 2011 during my first endurance racing event running in Texas, everyone else on the team had a cool shirt except me. I was cocky and said I didn't care, but after a 2 hour stint, I felt like trash. In another endurance event later that same year with another team, they didn't have a driver cooling system in the car at all. I did a 2:45 hour stint that time and was definitely "not 100%" at the end of that stint.
In both of those endurance races I lost close to 8 pounds each day driving in a single 2 hour stint. Dangerous levels of dehydration occur when you sweat that much for that long. Nowadays almost ALL teams running warm weather endurance events run driver cooling systems, and every driver has a vest or shirt. The hoses poke through the bottom of the fire suit zipper, as shown above right. Hey, don't make it weird!
Last anecdote and we can start building a cooler. My wife Amy started running more Texas summer Time Trial events in 2023, matching my crazy 30 event per year schedule. And in Texas, the June-July-August events can be pretty brutal, with ambient temps touching 100 degrees on many days. Even skipping running our (optional in Time Trial) fire suits at these events, we were both still getting wiped out from the heat.
I started using a cool suit regularly in 2021, and my only regret was not doing it sooner. The costs for the ice chest based systems are relatively low, especially compared to a trip to the Emergency Room from heat exhaustion. In the last few years we have seen med tech companies showing up a track events to do Hydration Therapy, where they put an IV into your arm and replenish a driver's fluids with a bag of water, electrolytes and other goodies. And while this is a great fix for people that have gotten too hot and dehydrated, it isn't cheap. I'd prefer to stay cool while driving with about $500-700 worth of cool shirt parts and not need the IV treatment after.
When I started using a cool suit system at these Time Trial events, we found these new "cool vests", which are just like cool shirts with capillary tubes sewn in, but a zipper down the front. These are MUCH easier to put on and remove, and we often leave them hooked up in the car and just slip it on right as we hop into the car (unless we are wearing a fire suit, then it has to go on outside of the car). Taking a tight fitting cool shirt off is a lot of work, because the tubes sewn into the shirt make it less flexible and harder to get off.
Once you have a driver cooling system in your car, and you have the hoses hooked up, you just flip the switch to pump ice cold water through your cool shirt or vests, and WOW! You can instantly feel it. You drive better with your core temps under control AND you aren't totally wiped out the next day recovering. We have made laps wearing these cooling systems with ambient temps of 105F and higher, and the only thing that suffered were the tires. We will talk about different types of systems, how to mount them, and how they work
ICE WATER VS "ICELESS" DRIVER COOLING SYSTEMS
There are two main methods of driver cooling with water shirts and vests. One is an ice chest with a pump inside, and you dump ice and water into it. The other is a mini air conditioner, which has a lot more costs and other "needs" that the ice chest systems do not. Both systems send the cold water through your cool shirt. I won't get into helmet air coolers, which is another option but even more complicated and spendy.
There are Pros and Cons to each, which we will cover below. Just know that one system costs much more than the other, and has many more downsides...
ICE CHEST COOLERS
The simplest, most reliable, and most cost effective driver cooling system is an ice chest based system. These are simple enough that a child can use them - you drop in a bag of ice, poke a few holes in the bag, then add some water to the cooler. When you have it all connected, an internal pump pushes ice cold water (as long as there is any ice left, it stays right at 32F) through hoses into your shirt or vest. For anyone running under 2 hour driving stints, this is almost always the solution.
The ice water runs next to your "core" - your chest and back, from neck to waist. This is where your heart, lungs and a lot of your blood runs. Your blood not only feeds oxygen to your cells, it can cool down your organs, muscles and brain. And an overheated brain will mess you up fast.
These are typically made with a 13 or 19 quart sized cooler, which are relatively easy to package in just about any race car, but there are now even smaller cylindrical systems out as well. We tend to use the 19 quart systems and mount them in the trunk. The typical systems are sold with a tray that is hard mounted to the chassis with Velcro straps that secure the ice chest into that.
This style of tray mounted / strapped cooler leaves the top able to be unlatched and ice bags swapped out without removing the whole cooler. This means you can leave the pump wiring and hoses connected while swapping out bags between stints. These have evolved, and earlier systems were not this easy to use - you did have to pull the ice chest out each time to get the lid opened.
It is really hard to argue against these ice chest based systems unless you are doing much longer 2+ hour endurance racing stints or multiple drivers over 7-24 hours. We have still seen some teams use a 20 pound BLOCK of ice, which lasts longer than the 7-10 pound bags of ice cubes, but it always eventually melts. The pros are much lower cost (around $320 for an off-the-shelf ice chest based system), lower amperage draw (just a simple low amperage pump), and overall simplicity and reliability.
The other "cons" with these are the "on / off" nature of how these pumps work. As long as there is still ice in the cooler, the water is literally ice cold, and that can be jarring. Some driver's just deal with it and will switch the pump on and off as they have any free "brain cycles" during a racing stint. Make sure to keep the pump switch within reach!
Of course there are flow controller options for the pumps, which can help the driver dial in the coolness. This is a very handy upgrade if you can stomach the extra cost (this single flow control knob + panel is $230 from Coolshirt). The added costs for this knob seem a bit much. After all, this isn't some pulse width modulated fuel pump controller "high tech" device, it is a simple $5 rheostat. Look for a follow up post showing some lower cost hacks to make this work on a budget.
Pro Tip: If you add a flow control knob, put that near the driver, possibly even out of sight but just behind the shifter (see above left), or nearby on the dash. When you use one of these systems with a flow controller you will ONLY want to use them like this. You can dial in the cool and not have that frigid ice water at full pressure. The iceless systems also have a temp setting they shoot for, which keeps you from fiddling with switches and knobs.
The other "con" to an ice chest based system is you keep having to swap out bags of ice, and scoop out the extra water (from the melted ice) when the bags have to be replaced. Not a big deal for HPDE or Time Trial use. Even Club Racing W2W stints of 20-45 minutes tend never to "run out of ice". The only time it is an issue is at long endurance events that do not have mandated pit stops. But if you have any ice left in the cooler at the end of the day, you can use it to chill your adult beverages!
ICELESS SYSTEMS
Endurance racers (7+ hour events) usually run an ice chest based system out of ice in every driver stint, and some will spend the extra money on a mini air conditioner system. Again, these are based on small, portable, medical cryotherapy systems. And for some endurance teams it can be worth the extra cost and hassles.
These iceless systems are self contained air conditioning systems, which are very small and cool the liquid that circulates through your shirt in a closed loop coolant system. One of the main downsides with these systems is they dump waste heat into whatever area that you mount it into - be it the cabin or trunk.Trunk wouldn't be so bad, but it then heats up the whole area around the iceless system.
We didn't have room in the trunk of our LS550 Mustang shown here, so we mounted it in the back seat area. Since it has some heft when filled with water, we didn't want it flying around in a crash, so we made a very sturdy bracket for mounting it. This first iteration was taking in cabin air to cool the evaporation core of the internal air conditioner, and dumping waste heat back into the cabin. We ran it like this for a couple of events but it was not extremely effective - as the cabin got hotter, the cooler worked worse and worse.
The owner of the company that supplied this iceless cooler to us strongly suggested venting in cool outside air to the inlet side of the unit. We opened up the unit and found the best place to add this dual 3" plastic duct, and then brought in fresh air from outside the cabin with another identical dual 3" inlet duct mounted as a scoop at the B-pillar of the car, just behind the right side door window opening. That worked a lot better.
This fresh air routing took in cooler outside air, but we still had the waste heat dumping into the cabin. Venting the exhaust from this unit outside the cabin would have added even more efficiency, but things started getting a little too complex for this Time Trial car.
There were some other small issues. These iceless units hold a VERY small amount of water, and each time you disconnect the quick-connect hoses on your cool shirt, a little bit spills out. It didn't take too many times before the water level inside the unit dropped enough to put it into "not working" status. Where we had it mounted it was difficult to check and refill the water levels, compounding our issues.
continued below
Many of you reading this are track junkies who, like us here in Texas, live in climates that can get hot enough to become too taxing to the human body in road course racing. So let's talk about our absolute FAVORITE way to stay cool in a track car - with ICE WATER running through a vest or shirt!
CRYOTHERAPY FOR MOTORSPORTS
Cryotherapy, also known as cold therapy, is the local use of low temperatures in medical therapy. Cryotherapy may be used to treat a variety of tissue, joint or muscle problems - especially post surgery. This usually involves some sort of wrapping around a part of the body with cold water pumped through to affect tissues in a localized area. These medical devices were eventually applied to Motorsports to create "driver cooling" systems.
These are used in a race car (or in the racing pits, as shown above with a portable system) to keep a driver's core body temperature cooler. Very cold water is pumped through a shirt (usually) with capillary tubes, and that cools the blood in your chest - the internal cooling system of the human body. That makes the blood going to your muscles and BRAIN cooler, which reduces fatigue, promotes better driver reactions, allows a wider range of view (perception), and less chance of getting heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
And while many of the track regulars like to brag about the heat not affecting them... as you step up your safety game and start wearing a 2-3 layer fire suit, and/or as your track car becomes more of a gutted race car (with no insulation at the firewall or floor to hot things nearby), getting overheated can become a real issue.
Which is why this post is in our "safety gear" section of our forum - because at a certain point, this becomes a safety concern. But for those more competitive folks, it DOES help mental acuity, and can make you drive faster and more reliably. It's a driving hack that anyone can exploit!
JUST RUN YOUR CAR'S A/C? NOPE
Some of you reading this that have never done a track event might think, why can't I just turn on my air conditioner while driving on track? While these systems works great at keeping the interior of your car cool while driving on the street in even the hottest climates, it does not work well when driving on track.
Almost all modern cars have an automated shut-off for the air conditioning compressor when you mash the throttle wide open. This is a safety feature common on all internal combustion engines since the 1990s, to keep abrupt changes in engine RPM from destroying the electro-magnetic clutch that is used to engage and disengage the compressor.
Most track drivers on most tracks are driving at at Wide Open Throttle for 50-70% of a lap, so the air con is turned off most of the time. Also, to be effective even in those 30-50% of the time periods on track where it could kick on and cool, the windows would have to be up. Strangely enough, some IMSA pro / GT series where OEM air con is used, to keep the drivers cool. They mandate that the cars MUST run the air con on and windows up. Again, this is the exception and not the rule.
WINDOWS DOWN ON TRACK
Driving on track with your windows up and the A/C blasting doesn't work for most of us, as we have to run windows down at any HPDE, W2W, or Time Trial that I know of. That allows the drivers to give clear point-bys (sticking your arm out thew window to point another driver by).
Windows down running also gives corner workers better access if a driver is in an incident, and stuck inside the car or otherwise incapacitated. In rare cases some HPDE groups allow windows up, but only if it is raining HARD, and you have turn signals to communicate point by signals.
With the windows down, running the A/C does almost nothing. Test it yourself - drive around on a hot summer day with your windows down and and the air con blowing on max - it does almost nothing once you are above speeds of about 10 mph. And for some of us, the air con was ditched in our race cars long ago, for weight savings and better engine cooling.
ENDURANCE RACING
In 2011 during my first endurance racing event running in Texas, everyone else on the team had a cool shirt except me. I was cocky and said I didn't care, but after a 2 hour stint, I felt like trash. In another endurance event later that same year with another team, they didn't have a driver cooling system in the car at all. I did a 2:45 hour stint that time and was definitely "not 100%" at the end of that stint.
In both of those endurance races I lost close to 8 pounds each day driving in a single 2 hour stint. Dangerous levels of dehydration occur when you sweat that much for that long. Nowadays almost ALL teams running warm weather endurance events run driver cooling systems, and every driver has a vest or shirt. The hoses poke through the bottom of the fire suit zipper, as shown above right. Hey, don't make it weird!
Last anecdote and we can start building a cooler. My wife Amy started running more Texas summer Time Trial events in 2023, matching my crazy 30 event per year schedule. And in Texas, the June-July-August events can be pretty brutal, with ambient temps touching 100 degrees on many days. Even skipping running our (optional in Time Trial) fire suits at these events, we were both still getting wiped out from the heat.
I started using a cool suit regularly in 2021, and my only regret was not doing it sooner. The costs for the ice chest based systems are relatively low, especially compared to a trip to the Emergency Room from heat exhaustion. In the last few years we have seen med tech companies showing up a track events to do Hydration Therapy, where they put an IV into your arm and replenish a driver's fluids with a bag of water, electrolytes and other goodies. And while this is a great fix for people that have gotten too hot and dehydrated, it isn't cheap. I'd prefer to stay cool while driving with about $500-700 worth of cool shirt parts and not need the IV treatment after.
When I started using a cool suit system at these Time Trial events, we found these new "cool vests", which are just like cool shirts with capillary tubes sewn in, but a zipper down the front. These are MUCH easier to put on and remove, and we often leave them hooked up in the car and just slip it on right as we hop into the car (unless we are wearing a fire suit, then it has to go on outside of the car). Taking a tight fitting cool shirt off is a lot of work, because the tubes sewn into the shirt make it less flexible and harder to get off.
Once you have a driver cooling system in your car, and you have the hoses hooked up, you just flip the switch to pump ice cold water through your cool shirt or vests, and WOW! You can instantly feel it. You drive better with your core temps under control AND you aren't totally wiped out the next day recovering. We have made laps wearing these cooling systems with ambient temps of 105F and higher, and the only thing that suffered were the tires. We will talk about different types of systems, how to mount them, and how they work
ICE WATER VS "ICELESS" DRIVER COOLING SYSTEMS
There are two main methods of driver cooling with water shirts and vests. One is an ice chest with a pump inside, and you dump ice and water into it. The other is a mini air conditioner, which has a lot more costs and other "needs" that the ice chest systems do not. Both systems send the cold water through your cool shirt. I won't get into helmet air coolers, which is another option but even more complicated and spendy.
There are Pros and Cons to each, which we will cover below. Just know that one system costs much more than the other, and has many more downsides...
ICE CHEST COOLERS
The simplest, most reliable, and most cost effective driver cooling system is an ice chest based system. These are simple enough that a child can use them - you drop in a bag of ice, poke a few holes in the bag, then add some water to the cooler. When you have it all connected, an internal pump pushes ice cold water (as long as there is any ice left, it stays right at 32F) through hoses into your shirt or vest. For anyone running under 2 hour driving stints, this is almost always the solution.
The ice water runs next to your "core" - your chest and back, from neck to waist. This is where your heart, lungs and a lot of your blood runs. Your blood not only feeds oxygen to your cells, it can cool down your organs, muscles and brain. And an overheated brain will mess you up fast.
These are typically made with a 13 or 19 quart sized cooler, which are relatively easy to package in just about any race car, but there are now even smaller cylindrical systems out as well. We tend to use the 19 quart systems and mount them in the trunk. The typical systems are sold with a tray that is hard mounted to the chassis with Velcro straps that secure the ice chest into that.
This style of tray mounted / strapped cooler leaves the top able to be unlatched and ice bags swapped out without removing the whole cooler. This means you can leave the pump wiring and hoses connected while swapping out bags between stints. These have evolved, and earlier systems were not this easy to use - you did have to pull the ice chest out each time to get the lid opened.
It is really hard to argue against these ice chest based systems unless you are doing much longer 2+ hour endurance racing stints or multiple drivers over 7-24 hours. We have still seen some teams use a 20 pound BLOCK of ice, which lasts longer than the 7-10 pound bags of ice cubes, but it always eventually melts. The pros are much lower cost (around $320 for an off-the-shelf ice chest based system), lower amperage draw (just a simple low amperage pump), and overall simplicity and reliability.
The other "cons" with these are the "on / off" nature of how these pumps work. As long as there is still ice in the cooler, the water is literally ice cold, and that can be jarring. Some driver's just deal with it and will switch the pump on and off as they have any free "brain cycles" during a racing stint. Make sure to keep the pump switch within reach!
Of course there are flow controller options for the pumps, which can help the driver dial in the coolness. This is a very handy upgrade if you can stomach the extra cost (this single flow control knob + panel is $230 from Coolshirt). The added costs for this knob seem a bit much. After all, this isn't some pulse width modulated fuel pump controller "high tech" device, it is a simple $5 rheostat. Look for a follow up post showing some lower cost hacks to make this work on a budget.
Pro Tip: If you add a flow control knob, put that near the driver, possibly even out of sight but just behind the shifter (see above left), or nearby on the dash. When you use one of these systems with a flow controller you will ONLY want to use them like this. You can dial in the cool and not have that frigid ice water at full pressure. The iceless systems also have a temp setting they shoot for, which keeps you from fiddling with switches and knobs.
The other "con" to an ice chest based system is you keep having to swap out bags of ice, and scoop out the extra water (from the melted ice) when the bags have to be replaced. Not a big deal for HPDE or Time Trial use. Even Club Racing W2W stints of 20-45 minutes tend never to "run out of ice". The only time it is an issue is at long endurance events that do not have mandated pit stops. But if you have any ice left in the cooler at the end of the day, you can use it to chill your adult beverages!
ICELESS SYSTEMS
Endurance racers (7+ hour events) usually run an ice chest based system out of ice in every driver stint, and some will spend the extra money on a mini air conditioner system. Again, these are based on small, portable, medical cryotherapy systems. And for some endurance teams it can be worth the extra cost and hassles.
These iceless systems are self contained air conditioning systems, which are very small and cool the liquid that circulates through your shirt in a closed loop coolant system. One of the main downsides with these systems is they dump waste heat into whatever area that you mount it into - be it the cabin or trunk.Trunk wouldn't be so bad, but it then heats up the whole area around the iceless system.
We didn't have room in the trunk of our LS550 Mustang shown here, so we mounted it in the back seat area. Since it has some heft when filled with water, we didn't want it flying around in a crash, so we made a very sturdy bracket for mounting it. This first iteration was taking in cabin air to cool the evaporation core of the internal air conditioner, and dumping waste heat back into the cabin. We ran it like this for a couple of events but it was not extremely effective - as the cabin got hotter, the cooler worked worse and worse.
The owner of the company that supplied this iceless cooler to us strongly suggested venting in cool outside air to the inlet side of the unit. We opened up the unit and found the best place to add this dual 3" plastic duct, and then brought in fresh air from outside the cabin with another identical dual 3" inlet duct mounted as a scoop at the B-pillar of the car, just behind the right side door window opening. That worked a lot better.
This fresh air routing took in cooler outside air, but we still had the waste heat dumping into the cabin. Venting the exhaust from this unit outside the cabin would have added even more efficiency, but things started getting a little too complex for this Time Trial car.
There were some other small issues. These iceless units hold a VERY small amount of water, and each time you disconnect the quick-connect hoses on your cool shirt, a little bit spills out. It didn't take too many times before the water level inside the unit dropped enough to put it into "not working" status. Where we had it mounted it was difficult to check and refill the water levels, compounding our issues.
continued below
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