my brother's car is a 94Z A4. it does good in town driving normal temp. but when we get on the highway at a steady speed his temp starts to climb slowly. it has coolant. his fans are working as well. his RPM's at 70 are about 2300 or so. well before i forget to mention he barely swaped his 2.73's to 3.73's. would this be a problem with the car to act like this?

 

Is the front air dam in place? If not, it needs to be there.

 

where is this located at? it should be in place if it's the one i'm thinking about.

 

It's the thing that hangs down under the radiator and pulls in air (and an occasional varmint or Walmart bag). If it is there, check the front of the radiator for debris. Sometimes there is even junk between the radiator and the a/c condenser.

 

do you have a diagram of it? sorry newbie

 

You can see what hes talking about in this picture. http://rides.webshots.com/photo/2093...61674390KjBdlX See the black plastic flap under the front of my teal camaro? Thats it.

 

well he lowered it 1 3/4. would this be the problem? he forgot to mention cause i haven't seen his car yet.

 

Lowering is not a problem if the air dam is still there. Now, if he has ground effects that are blocking the air dam, he might have an issue. The fix is an extended air dam, but on a lowered car, it might scrape everything on the road.

 

Just thought I'd note, much of the time when someone "lowers" and gets ground effects, they just got the ground effects and think their car is lower because of the ground effects. A former friend of mine was gonna buy a car cos it was "lowered" he later found out it was just ground effects and not actually lowered.

 

Common sense must prevail.

 

The reason he didnt buy the damned thing (and good thing he didnt it was a ford probe) is the same reason I got a 4th gen bird instead of a 2nd gen camaro. The damned things wouldnt start when we went out to look at em, although I do regret not getting the 2nd gen, it was a v8 to v6 swap that they over cammed and over carb'd. If I would have just put a little work into it it would have ran beautifuly :/

 

do you guys think this would be from like his thermostat or waterpump?

 

Lack of air flow or water flow. That could be caused by a partially opening thermostat or bad water pump (though LT1 pumps don't seem to commonly exhibit this). Checking the easy things like have already been mentioned should be the first step. Even checking the fluid level.

 

If its fine at all times except at speed the t-stat and waterpump are fine. Its an air flow issue.

 

the front air dam is inplace everything seems. fine. we're gonna replace the thermostat and we'll go from there.