Your experience with under $200 ALUMINUM Radiators from Ebay

[ew1usnr]

I never needed fans, removed them all for a NOTICEABLE kick in the pants, acceleration-wise.

The steel fan only weighs 2.25 pounds, so I wondered how it could slow down the acceleration of a 2900 pound car. A little internet reading yielded the following points of view:

The loss of acceleration may be due to the drag of the fan rather than its weight. I read one article where a guy put a 350 HP car on a dyno and tried different mechanical fans. He claimed that at 4500 RPM a fan can take away 35 - 40 HP! ?? ?? That seems hard to believe.
See: http://carnut.com/ramblin/dyno.html

Then another guy said that the dyno test was incorrect because a car would be moving forward at 100 mph if the engine was turning at 4500 rpm. With air rushing through the radiator at that speed the fan actually takes very little power to turn. That sounded reasonable.

But then another guy refuted that idea by saying that during hard acceleration a car is initially moving slow while the the fan is spinning at at a high RPM and producing maximum drag. That guy has a point also.

All this makes me wonder how much drag my fan creates in the 3000 rpm (65 mph) range that I typically drive.