Heat is the enemy. Heat saps performance, reduces engine life, and in extreme cases, can kill your motor. The AVO Front Mount Intercooler for your STI 2008+ is the solution. Whenever you turn up the boost to get more power out of your turbocharged vehicle, increased amounts of heat and pressure is generated.

One of the biggest bottlenecks is the tiny and cheaply made stock top mounted factory OEM intercoolers. Even upgraded top mount intercoolers can quickly reach their flow limits, and suffer from heat-soak, an unavoidable situation created by the TMIC sitting on top of a hot engine while the car is not moving. The best answer to both problems is a front mounted intercooler. Back pressure in the intercooler system is lowered because of the larger intercooler core design made possible by the space available in the front of the car. The issue of heat soak is not a problem as the FMIC is not sitting on top of a hot engine!

It is a little more complicated than that, though. You cannot simply throw any front mount intercooler onto your car. As a FMIC was not part of the original car design, space is very tight so AVO spent countless hours in R&D engineering the correct cast aluminium end tanks and piping/hosing. This was all so that you could retain your original foglights on your Legacy with a minimum of trimming on the inside of the bumper. Piping to and from the turbo and throttle body were kept as short a length as possible as well to keep pressure drop to a minimum. Not only does the AVO FMIC allow you to keep your foglights, but with our included bumper beam spacers, allows you to keep your bumper beam as well. The cutaway photograph above shows the placement of the FMIC and hoses, and also shows the bumper beam as fitted with the FMIC. As you can see below, tolerances were quite tight with a nice size of 595 x 222 x 90mm.

The AVO intercooler core is huge and suffers from very little pressure loss, even at 500hp! The cast aluminium end tanks were specifically designed and engineered for high air flow, as poorly designed end tanks would negate the performance advantages of the large core. As demonstrated in the bottom right, an inferior end tank design, commonly found on aftermarket tube and finn intercoolers, can directly impact the overall performance of the intercooler. When the end tank is too small and square, it creates a condition where most of the intercooler is simply not being used. Air becomes forced through a smaller part of the core. This lowers the cooling ability of the intercooler, as the majority of air goes through only a small amount of the intercooler core. Much of the intercooler is literally wasted. It is not only the end tanks that have been carefully thought out.

Heavy-duty Kevlar-reinforced rubber piping and powdercoated black steel pipes ensure the air continues to flow fast and cool throughout the system. Smooth bends throughout minimise performance robbing bottlenecks. We’ve engineered the piping to use as few joins as possible. This is to minimise blow-out failure when running at extreme pressure as the more joins that you use the more areas in the system that can possibly fail. As well, all of our steel piping and components are powder-coated as well, which helps keep it clean for many years. The time and effort in engineering the kit was worth it, as it has minimised any performance compromises and kept installation as simple as possible.

Our high-flow bar and plate intercooler also ensures that enough air goes past the intercooler and into your radiator to keep engine temperatures normal even under prolonged heavy-duty usage. We could have made the task easier on ourselves by simply going with a smaller, thinner core, but that would have compromised the ultimate performance of this FMIC. It would have reduced the amount of internal surface area vital to cooling the hot pressurised air flow. The AVO intercooler is not an appearance item only, it is also an essential performance part. Power junkies will be able to make all the power they need, when they need it. Our heavy duty design goes past racing, however, as even more regular drivers that simply have big loads to tow can enjoy the torque benefits this system will allow, and the increased cooling necessary for engines under heavy loads for long time periods.

At 500hp, intake temperatures are around 150 degrees centigrade before the intercooler and by the time it has reached the other end temperatures have dropped to 38 degrees centigrade! And there is only a 1psi drop in boost pressure, even at 600hp! This illustration shows how the hot air flows in from the left and is cooled as it passes through the FMIC core. This hot air is coming directly from the turbo, and the cool air is going to the throttle body.

The chart below shows how dramatic the temperature drop is with an AVO FMIC, and how little the pressure drop is. Measurements were taken directly after the turbocharger and right before the throttle body. All this simply demonstrates how efficient our intercooler systems are. Part of this is due to the aluminium bar-and-plate design, which is more efficient and better at cooling than the tube and finn design used on the stock TMIC. Some manufacturers prefer tube and finn designs for the fact that they are cheap to make and easy to produce in large numbers, but when it comes to both performance and longevity there should be no such compromise!