Avid viewers of Carnage would’ve seen that we recently raced our L67-swapped VN Commodore at Heathcote Park Raceway, running a PB of 13.19 @105mph.

Scotty was hoping for 12s out of the Supermang, but we had three main issues: traction, gearing and high intake temps.

We plan to address the gearing and traction issues with a diff overhaul in the new year, so in this episode Scotty decided to experiment with the intercooling we have schemed to solve those temp issues.

The L67 experts at Mace Engineering provided the intermediate plate we needed that goes between the blower and the intake manifold to cool the charged air. While most would be tempted to just route the charged air through a normal air-to-air intercooler at the front of the car and call it a day, Scotty decided that for this project he wanted to go a bit left of field and run a water-to-air system.

Before plumbing in the water-to-air system, Scotty had to pull the blower off of the L67 to install the intermediate plate. As part of that upgrade, Scotty also threw on a modified intake manifold and blower snout from Bazspec Fabrications. The massaged intake manifold allows for more flow, while the blower snout was machined down to accommodate smaller boost pulleys without any fouling issues. More boost means more power!

He sourced a barrel intercooler from eBay, and that combined with the heat exchanger and a bunch of silicone joiners, a couple of metres of hose and a water pump temporarily feeding liquid from the side of a plastic tub made up the rest of the system. If it works, it works!

We should stress at this point that this isn’t the final form of the cooling solution for Supermang. Scotty made it work as quickly as possible to get it onto the dyno down at Maxx Performance before the Christmas shutdown, and it also means we can test the effectiveness of water-to-air versus air-to-air intercooling without fully committing to either.

After some minor head scratching, Scotty had the whole system temporarily plumbed up and ready to hit the dyno down at Maxx. In a fresh episode next week, we’ll get to see how much of a difference the intercooler makes and if we can squeeze any more power out of this little 3.8-litre – so tune in Monday!