As usual, when we’re not convinced 100 %, the air filter installment kept running through Dirk’s mind night after night like a bad ghost. Knowing there’s a prehistory , water still scares us immensely, so big puddles or even extreme big puddles forcing us to quit is no longer an option.
To prevent this from happening we quickly came up with a solution by adding an extra relatively small filter ( 38 mm diameter ) in the intake pipe. Under normal circumstances this is very restrictive as opposed to the big intake underneath and will barely let any air pass through. In case a huge amount of water feels like entering the system, it will take less effort to suck in air through the small filter then to suck in the whole water column.
The breathing issue needed some more thinking. I recall that during the DTM era they once used a filter stocking which was placed in the funnel leading to the airbox.
With this knowledge and supported by our curved intake pipe the idea came to mind to have a cone shaped mousse filter developed.
The cone has 2 reasons:
1 we need sufficient filter surface.
2 we need to be able to follow exactly the shape of the intake pipe.
This will create enough space between the sides of the pipe and the filter so we’ll never suffer from “shortness of breath”.
Result : the smurf hat
