Thread: SR20VE oil pressure

What oil pressure you are getting on yours VE´s?

- Cold engine idle
- Warm engine idle
- Warm engine under the load

Can high oil pressure be dangerous to the engine? Friends hillclimb race has high oil pressure (compared to SR20DE engines), so we are wondering...

Thanks for input.

my cold idle with 10w40 oil is close to 100psi like 90 or 95psi
the warm idle is over 25psi
and the under load depends on the rpm but mostly over 100psi

hope this helps!

Yes high oil pressure can be very bad. If you have too much there are a few different things that can happen. You can unseat a crank or rod bearing, or you can pit the bearing because of the high pressure hitting it where the oil journal is. If you have a turbo on your car and you run high oil pressure you can accually buy inline orifice valves that go on the turbo oil feed line to cut down on the pressure that might cause you to blow out a bearing or seal in the turbo. You would have to run a very high oil pressure to have the first two mentioned happen tho. I had a 86 toyota corolla with a 3SGTE swap and at cold start i was running 725 kPa cold start up and 300 warm idle thats in the area of 115/30 psi respectively. Which at the time i thought was high but i guess thats the norm for VE's with what i see in the previous post.

Castrol full synthetic 5w30

- Cold engine idle - 80PSI
- Warm engine idle - 25-30PSI generally
- Warm engine under the load - 90-100PSI

10w-30 M1
85 psi
15-20 psi
100+ psi

German Castrol 0w-30

Winter cold start = 100+psi
Summer cold start = 80psi
Idle (warmed up) = 18-20psi
Under load = 80-100psi

Thanks guys. Thats very close to our numbers. Time to add oil cooler, because oil gets really hot in SR20VE under race condition.

oil pressure is going to vary depending on the oil used, a thicker oil is going to yeild higher oil pressures, however higher oil pressures also means not as great of flow throughout the engine. less oil pressure doesnt always mean things arent working as well either, just could be using a thinner oil when the engine is warm.

We are using Liqui Moly GT1 Race Tech 10w60 oil.

10 -60 is pretty heavy!!!

What engine bearings do you run in your motors?