Process West Verticooler (MY15-16 WRX Verticooler)

December 2014 saw a revolution in WRX Intercooler design. We called it ‘Verticooler’ but behind the flash name this piece of Process West engineering turned conventional thinking on its head and changed the face of Subaru Top Mount Intercooling forever.

Sporting the efficiency of a Front Mount Intercooler system, and the neat compact packaging of existing Top Mount technology, Verticooler has quickly become a tuners favourite and entrenched in the world-wide Subaru tuning scene.

It’s not just the unique mounting position and catchy name that set Verticooler apart though, as the pure raw data in terms of heat rejection, pressure drop, and overall efficiency effectively reset the benchmark for Top Mount Intercoolers. Many tuners have remarked that the data they see from Verticooler resets expectation and proves that Top Mount Intercooling really is a sensible and viable high performance solution.

All the MY14 and previous Verticooler smarts have been carried over, repackaged, engineered, tested, and is now offered for MY15 cars. In short, current generation Verticooling has arrived!

Components

The MY15 Verticooler kit comes complete with:

Bar and plate intercooler with core measurements of 400 x 205 x 120mm

Underhood duct

Scoop air diverter wings

Mandrel bent aluminium intercooler charge pipe

Engine pulley garnish

The above parts are all included in the kit which makes it the most complete system on the market.

It is also available in black or silver finish.

Track Testing

A hard test session was carried out at Australia’s Regional Wakefield Park Racing circuit. Although being a very cold day… about 14C in ambient temperature a series of rigorous tests were carried out in an attempt to pile on the heat.

Scheduled testing of 7 – 10 minutes at a time of flat out operation is enough to see the factory cooler heat-soaked and the intake temps start to rocket, but the Verticooler equipped MY15 pegged the inlet at no more than 23C

Any way you look at that data it’s a delta temperature change of only 9 degrees celcius, which is in fact the kind of temp gain you would normally expect to see in a normally aspirated application! Don’t believe it? Well as they say ‘The data never lies’ and we have included the raw testing to show you how good Verticooler really is!

Green trace shows intercooler outlet temperatures in degree C

Red trace shows intercooler inlet temperatures in degree C

Black trace shows speed in km/h

Dyno Testing

Once we felt – and measured – how good the Verticooler system was on the track it was time to see how the numbers stacked up on the dyno. The procedure went like this -

First was baseline testing

Car was stock with a cat back exhaust… pink line

We then tuned the car with stock intercooler… green line

Verticooler was then installed and allowed a much more aggressive timing map and increased boost… red line

We also performed 3 back to back dyno pulls in quick sucession.
The Stock intercooler saw outlet temps quickly rise to 51 degee C.
Verticooler kept temps indefinitely under control with max outlet temp of 26 C.
It’s also worth noting that this testing was done in the midst of winter here in Australia.
Expect a much larger performance difference between the stock intercooler and Verticooler in the heat of summer.

Stock intercooler 3 x back to back runs - note intercooler outlet temperature – green trace

Verticooler 3 back to back runs - note intercooler outlet temperature – green trace