[Steve91T]

Sometimes I like to reinvent the wheel, I don't know why.

So I hate being hot. Worst thing is wearing a helmet where I can't feel air on my face. I can't imagine what it's going to be like with a full racing suit. So my plan is to buy a G Force helmet with an air hose attachment and my wife can make a shirt with fish tank hose running through it.

I then want to mount a removable cooler of some sort in the car with a drain valve. I'm going to use the windshield washer pump as the water pump for the shirt.

So, another idea I have is instead of ducting air hot air from outside, I'm was thing I'd rather have cold air go through my helmet. I'm going to mount a small fan on the side of the cooler, pulling air from inside the car, through the cooler, then suffer through my helmet. I imagine sitting in the car staging, everyone else will be roasting, and i can flip a switch and be comfortable. I'm pretty sure I can make this whole set up for very little. I would image just a few lbs of ice and water would last the length of a race.

What do you guys use and how well do they work? What about weight?

[souseless]

I have tried a few homemade things to stay cool. The cool shirt can be great. For a pump we used a marine bilge pump mounted on a cooler. Large blocks of ice worked best. Cubes were too cold and didn't last long enough (for endurance racing). We froze water in plastic bottles and then cut the plastic off and dropped in the ice. Two reasons for that. we started off leaving the ice in the bottles but the labels were falling apart and plugging up the pump. The other problem was that as the ice melted in the bottle the water acted like an insulator and the water going through the shirt would warm up. tried ice packs a few times and that worked for a while and would likely be fine for sprint races. The key to the cool shirt and the ice pack shirt is to make sure that they stay close to the skin. A regular t shirt really doesn't work.