Well I better chime in now...I see a valid point in keeping the airflow clean meaning zero turbulance, as we have the hot wire MAF which needs a steady stream of clean flowing air to make calculations properly. I am positive a aftermarket or homebrew inlet tube/filter/airbox could be bought or fabricated to keep the airflow clean (near zero turbulance) and provide some benefit of increased airflow capacity. If someone could measure pressure's before the factory airbox and after it to see the restriction, there will be some sort of restriction, then do the same with an aftermarket or homebrew inlet/filter with or without an airbox. This would tell right away what flows better and what is a worthless. Personally I would prefer a smooth (on the inside) inlet tube with a airbox designed to allow incoming air into the filter to be clean (low turbulance) while drawing this inlet air from outside of the engine compartment. The tube preceding the MAF should be sufficiently long enough to provide said sensor with that clean flowing air for accurate measurements and less of a headache for the software to deal with. Since I just bought my RL, I haven't had the luxury of taking the air filter out to see what the factory airbox design look like inside. Previous experience on other cars have proven to myself that using airflow straightening techniques on the airbox can be an improvement in performance. This usually involves taking a factory airbox for example, and filling in certain areas with epoxy and using a die grinder/burr to pursuade the air to flow a certain way through the box into the filter and exiting the filter. To get real technical with it, a guy could build a clear airbox with clear inlet/outlet tubing and run it on a flowbench while introducing colored smoke into the air stream while observing how the smoke flows through the design later making adjustments to the design to make the smoke flow with less or near zero turbulance while tweaking the design for the achieved airflow volume required for the design. Whew!!! Complicated huh? Yes it is, but that could possibly develop into one heck of a nice flowing airbox/filter/inlet tube combo worth some bucks or eat up a lot of time you could have been watching TV
Mike
