KEEPING COOL
Fitting a performance intercooler is one of the key upgrades we can make to a tuned turbo’d car, and as such there are plenty of options available when it comes to binning the OE part and fitting something better suited to a tweaked fast Ford.
Many specialists, such as Airtec, even offer different levels of upgrade for the same car.
But is there any difference between them? Don’t they all just do the same thing? And are they even needed in the first place?
Well, to answer these questions – and back them up with some hard data – the guys at Airtec donned their scientific white coats, cracked out the thermocouples, and strapped their own Mk7 Fiesta ST onto the dyno to test their full range of intercooler options. They even threw in the stock original ST intercooler for good measure. The results are something of an eye-opener…
THE TEST
For this test, Airtec chose to run the car on the 2WD Dyno Dynamics dynamometer at WG Motorworks in Kent. The dyno would allow the car to be run in safe and, more importantly, repeatable conditions to allow fair and accurate comparison of any results. Airtec did complete a full loaded
