More air is always better, and the less channels and places it needs to go to draw from, the better.
On several older vehicles, mostly cars since we don't tend to go driving into fields and try to stick to highway driving with them, we'd often put on oversized air filters which means that the cleaner cap wouldn't actually make contact with the rest of the air cleaner housing which would expose the filter more directly and allow air to be pulled in from directly under the hood without being forced through the tiny air cleaner inlet. Between the sound of hearing the different in sound as the massive amount more air was sucked up, power noticably ramped up, and this is even more true in cold conditions where the air is far thicker.
I think there was a dyno test to see how the myth worked to either bust it or prove it as being accurate, and it was proven that depending on engine size, intake capabilities, you could see 5 hp and 15ftlbs of torque improvement on even a 4 cylinder engine of a small size to as much as 30-50+hp and 100ftlbs of torque on large ones.
There's a reason some illegal street racers would pull the air cleaners and filters completely off their engine, some even the hood too just to ensure they had a hope in beating their competitor or at least having the best possible chance, and at the end of the race, putting it all back on.
I would prefer to make the hoodscoop which is more for decoration currently, fully active. but of course the engine and air intake don't sit dead center to the hood, so that would require most likely custom designing which isn't necessarily cheap.
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