Do they really run without an air filter?

[kimokalihi]

All the time I see these cars with no intake on their turbo and there is no air filter. At first I just thought they removed it for shows but I've seen shots of these cars driving down the road with no air filter on their turbo and it's exposed through the hood or bumper so air and anything that happens to be traveling through the air can enter the turbo unfiltered.

Why would these people risk destroying their very expensive turbo and engine driving around with no air filter?

[evolutionmovement]

Because they're stupid? They're probably trailer queens as they don't look like dedicated track cars—look how spotlessly clean they are—those cars aren't driven and certainly haven't been in battle on a track. People lower cars to the point where they can't enter a parking lot without scraping, too. They do a lot of things they think looks cool, but make the car a poor performer or next to useless to drive in the real world. But the no air filter thing is nothing new. In the old days, people used to remove them just to so the sound of the carb sucking air made the engine sound more intimidating (my father was one who used to do that, along with buying used racing tires for his '58 Brookwood wagon. Kind of a reverse sleeper in that it sounded and appeared to be a poorly disguised sleeper, but really wouldn't get out of its own way). How quickly internal parts wear depends on the environment (and luck). Driving around once in a while like that (and perhaps like many of these built up cars, rarely driven hard) probably has a negligible effect, but it's nothing I'd ever do.

[kimokalihi]

That guy in with the red truck drags that truck. It's not just a show car. Maybe there is a filter that we can't see that's in between that piping and the supercharger but I doubt it.

[evolutionmovement]

Some of the old racecars used to have a wire mesh over the intakes just to keep out the bigger particles. If that guy drags the truck regularly, he probably also rebuilds the engine fairly frequently. When you're doing that and looking for the last thousandth of performance, it could make sense to leave out the filter (as long as the intake itself is optimized for flow, as the bracketing images seem to have, or else you'd only be sucking in crap for little to no gain as a filter can also reduce turbulence). Doing that on our cars, for instance, would probably make performance worse through inconsistent MAF readings as well as possible damage to the filament and wear on internals. Jet engines don't have filters, but they don't run on filthy roadway conditions filled with construction, sand, and truck tossings.

[SubyFusion]

I saw a guy with a Lexus the other day, at a car show who was running a turbo with no air filter, and it wasn't just a show car i'm pretty sure he drove it there.

[kimokalihi]

My friend is a honda weirdo and him and his honda buddys roll around with no air filter all the time. I tried telling him he was an idiot but he didn't care. He soon blew his engine and transmission racing but was probably unrelated.

[Legacy777]

Steve's first sentance is what I was thinking as I was reading the original post "Because they're stupid..."

I have seen filter "booties" that go over the turbo pipe to kind of act like a filter, but yeah, not running something to filter the air is not very smart. Drag racing is more or less ok, since you're not really exposed to lots of dirt & grime....

[bannerman]

Maybe not stupid, but certainly ignorant of the effects. They fail to understand that everything that goes into your engine must be filtered: fuel, oil, coolant, air. Let them walk around without kidneys for a while and see how they run without filters.