Balancing Performance, Heat, and Reliability
Hold a cigarette lighter up to your thumb for a split second, and you can probably tolerate it. Hold a lighter up to your thumb for 5 seconds, and you'll probably want to get the ice water ready. During those 5 seconds you're quickly using up your thumb's heat buffer. This parallels exactly what happens inside your engine when pulling up a grade at GVW or passing on the highway. Your engine has been well engineered with heat transfer pathways, designed to dissipate heat from the 'front lines' the same way the blood in your veins moves heat away from your skin in the cigarette lighter experiment. In the performance realm we are mainly concerned with 2 elements of these pathways, the first is the amount of heat the system can hold and the second is how quickly the system can move heat from the source.
"Your engine has well engineered heat transfer pathways to dissipate heat . . ."
