Usually our stage 2 upgrades on turbo charged cars involve the addition of a race exhaust as its the airflow restriction from the standard exhaust which is the next impediment to power gains, however with the Vectra VXR we’ve changed that policy to make the stage 2 for this model to include our larger front mounted intercooler.
The reason for this is simple, whilst a sports exhaust adds a bit of power the intercooler makes a dramatic difference to torque, even without mapping it adds 20-30NM just by fitting it, thats too big a gain to just ignore.
Fitting of a larger, more efficient inter-cooler is a crucial step towards obtaining larger amounts of power. Basically speaking an engine is a controlled explosion; mix air with fuel and ignite it – Bang, the cooler the air temperature, the higher the density of Oxygen. The greater the explosion = more power.
We only use proper motorsport cores in our intercooler, not cheap commercial vehicle versions (you can tell by how heavy they are) as these will not cool the airflow in high rpm environments. The torque gains are sufficiently high to require us to peg back the map to make sure the clutch and gearbox are protected.