Following on from Alan’s absolutely spotless engine bay with his charge cooler, I thought I’d pop mine up.

I use the same type of water pump in a similar position (just in front of the front wheel behind the bumper), although I don’t currently have a photo of it.

During the running of the car I had an issue with the front radiator so decided to get a new one built and combine it with a charge cooler radiator at the same time (see picture below). I fabricated a mockup out of super high tech cardboard to give to the radiator manufacturer in Cheltenham to copy.

The next photos show the finished radiator in parts and installed with the fan mounted. The radiator fits into the original mounting holes and was profiled to miss the bonnet catch and follow the line of the front bumper.

 

Making our way towards the rear of the car, again the same as Alan, the inlet and return pipes are attached in the little trough next to the doors.

In the back, you can see the small header tank at the bottom left.

The following picture show the charge cooler in the rear offside position, given the size of it this was the only place I could fit it!! Due to the location the pipework has to exit the turbo, run over the manifold, under the O/S wheel arch and around to the cooler. Then it has to navigate around all the other stuff in the engine bay to get back to the throttle body on the engine.

Overall, there is very little lag considering the length of pressurized pipework, quite shocking really!

The main question really is “Is it worth it?”, well… with the stock setup (intercooler in the side vent) I was seeing over 100 deg C inlet air temperatures so something needed to be done. With my ECU I can log inlet air temps to check what is going on, so I did….

32deg at 0.9 bar pressure, not bad….