COOL FLOW

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand the basic principle of forced induction or to appreciate that the cooler the air force-fed into your turbocharged or blown motor, the better its performance.

Now, in most cases the factory intercooler your car comes with is okay, it will do the job, but there are also compromises with mass production. For example, the OEM unit will have been produced in a way that keeps manufacturing costs down, often also so the product can be used across multiple models and to cope with factory levels of power. When you start increasing power and boost, often you will need to think about upgrading your intercooler, too.

Now, uprated front-mount intercoolers can make a huge difference to your car’s performance, even if your engine has only been lightly breathed on – especially where VW’s Mk7 Golf R and the tuner-happy TFSI two-litre motor is concerned. The trouble is, there are literally hundreds of solutions available for said engine on today’s after market.

Over the years experience has taught us that you’re far better paying a little extra and getting an aftermarket product that offers OEM levels of fit and proven performance, rather than buying some universal eBay special that will often have terrible build quality, won’t fit and may even offer less performance gains than your factory ‘cooler.

Many of the products below have been through hours of vigorous testing before being made available to the public. APR, for example, ran numerous dyno test on its product (pictured right). The tests were first conducted with an APR Stage 2 MK7 Golf R using the factory intercooler, then APR’s