Here’s a repost of the work done by DDPR to upgrade the Air-to-Water (A2W) intercooler setup on the MR2 Spyder. Quote from Dave & Jason:
After that we headed out to do some street tuning. We immediately noticed after a quick full throttle pull from 1st gear to the end of 2rd gear Chad’s Intake Air temps (IAT’s) were rising to very high levels. We were seeing 65*C IAT’s from 40*C IAT’s after just 2 gears of acceleration. Thankfully the IAT corrections we built into his map did their job and pulled a good deal of timing. We then cruised on the highway to see how long it would take for the IAT’s to stabilize. Incredibly it took almost 10 minutes and about 5-6 miles before the IAT’s returned down to 44*C. At that point we knew something was wrong with the Water to Air intercooler system. It seemed like there was no coolant circulating through the W2A core or it had a massive amount of air bubbles in the system drastically reducing the cores efficiency.
This is a good example of what happens when the W2A system has good parts (large heat exchanger, 600 hp core, quality pump) but uses lines that are too small, a resivoir that is not mounted high enough, does not have a bleeder on the I/C core to self bleed air bubbles, and does not have the correct hose routing of the system. The system ends up not flowing enough coolant, and gets air bubbles trapped in the core and ultimately wind up in the pump, which in turn does not allow coolant to circulate.
We took it back to the shop and contacted Chad about relocating his resivoir to the high point in the engine bay, relocating his pump, add a bleeder nipple to the W2A core, and re-route his hoses. We also needed to replace the 5/8 water lines with higher flow 3/4 lines that the system calls for.
After the fabrication was done we had the parts powdercoated wrinkle black to match the rest of Chad’s engine bay.
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