KDXRIDER.NET

I think its because of space saving reasons. Those fins take up a lot of room.

-Maurice

Ski brought up a very good point: engines NEED heat to operate efficiently. Most important to understand are Exhaust gas temps "EGT" which are a result of mainly jetting and are measured about 4" (dry ring)from the piston, and head temps which is simply what the temp is right on the plug. Our cooling systems must be able to cool in the extremes of very slow air movement and high ambient temps. These together make the worst case that the engineers try to overcome with the size of the radiators. In fact, many of our bikes run too cool to produce maximum HP. Unlike karters that run wide open most of the time with a very large amount of airflow and need max HP constantly to win, trail bikes rarely see this amount of airflow and don't need max HP every second. Karters are constantly jetting to obtain proper EGT's and head temps and they have gauges to monitor these. There will very few of us that ever put our bikes through conditions where overheating will be our main concern. If that situation ever arises, then the differences in coolant will come into play.

All this is very true... we try to draw the line between overheating and maximum running temps. This is how I overheated my camaro a few years ago... the thermostat ran at 210... when the electric fan went out it took all of 20 seconds to overheat and damage the motor. I didn't have time to get to the side of the road and shut it down before the damage was done. I just wish there was a safety built into the system but that would be asking for too much I guess.

Yes, Brad is correct that we will probably never run our engines to where temps are a major concern as long as the cooling system is functional and some blend of coolant is in the radiator fluid.