Forge Motorsport Twintercooler for VW Golf Mk7 GTI

Forge Motorsport has released an innovative new Twintercooler kit for the Golf GTI Mk7.

Drawing heavily on its motorsport preparation experience, particularly in arenas like Time Attack, where horsepower and engine temperature statistics wouldn’t look out of place in an F1 paddock, Forge has created an innovative alloy twin intercooler core set-up to increase the surface area of its hand-finished cores, whilst allowing them to mount discreetly in their stock positions. Although it’s easy to make a dining-table sized ‘cooler that would do the same job, the design team felt that if comparable improvements could be made by a component that could be hidden within stock bodywork, then so much the better…

Pretty much without exception, whenever you are tuning a car, whatever its engine type, you can expect to see two things happen if you’re doing it right. The first is the increase in power that you really wanted to see… and the second is a commensurate increase in heat that you really didn’t.

This is bad news on any power unit, but even more so on a forced induction car, where the spiralling cycle of heat only serves to expand the air/fuel mixture and reduce its molecular density. The result is a less powerful ‘bang’ during the combustion process – and therefore less power. Most modern ECUs will also reduce boost and fuelling tables whenever excessive heat is detected too, meaning your power increase can quickly be diminished as a series of sophisticated algorithms do their very best to keep the car within what it sees as ‘safe’ parameters.

For the most part, the factory solution on many forced induction cars is some form of intercooler, which will reduce the ‘charge’ temperature, increasing the molecular density of the air/fuel mixture and keeping a lid on temperatures. Like all OEM components, these are built down to a price, rather than up to a quality, so it’s little surprise to learn that they can quickly get swamped as soon as the car is pressed into more ‘full-on’ driving or indeed, should the power be increased by other means. Naturally, this problem is exacerbated on cars that live in hot climates or countries.

On the Golf Mk7, the Forge Twintercooler core sits out in front of the standard radiator, intercooler and air con condenser package, and is therefore in the direct line of all the cold air coming into the front of the car via the main lower grille. This core has been well-proven on a plethora of road and track machinery and will make an excellent and worthwhile addition to both stock or tuned VWs.

Further refining the tried and tested Twintercooler setup on the Mk5 and Mk6, this intercooler has been designed to run in parallel with the stock core, or, if preferred, for the ultimate cooling solution it can also be fitted in conjunction with Forge’s FMMK7FMIC intercooler (which mounts in the stock location and offers much improved cooling by itself).

Keen to prove the efficacy of this conversion, Forge undertook considerable dyno and road testing in order to evaluate it ability to reduce charge temperatures. As an isolated modification the Twintercooler core gave a huge 20°C (69°F) drop in temperature. Maintaining consistent test parameters, further comparison runs were carried out on the same day on the same dyno and in ambient temperatures of 6° C (42°F). You can tell this was in Forge’s UK tech centre, not its Florida HQ, can’t you?!

As the dyno sheets show, both power and torque increased a little – but bear in mind that these engines are only supposed to output 220bhp. Forge’s engineering team has seen them range from 230-250bhp completely stock – and there are various limitations imposed by the stock ECU. Those owners considering any of the remap options for this car that are available will have even more fun of course, being able to truly realise the extra power by exploiting the notably lower intake temperatures.

Taking less than 2 hours to fit, and needing no bumper trimming or modification of any kind, this is a great upgrade that can be realistically fitted by any talented home mechanic. All parts needed and full instructions are included… so now you really have no excuse for getting hot and bothered.

Forge