We were planning to run a Cosworth intake manifold on Project STI’s IAG motor but we were unable to find one for a decent price as they have been discontinued for many years. We wanted a stock location throttle body because we wanted to keep air conditioning and not mess with the accessory drives, this ruled out a lot of race-type manifolds. We had heard good things about the Australian Process West‘s intake manifold and we got one from Rally Sport Direct, the distributor for Process West.
The stock Subaru intake manifold runners are super long which is probably good for low rpm but not likely to match up with the camshaft in our new engine. The stock Subaru manifold has the smallest plenum we have ever seen on a modern engine as well and turbo engines general like a plenum volume of 1.5x engine displacement or greater and we have found this to be true many times on many different engines.
The Process West intake manifold is a beautiful piece, CNC machined from billet aluminum with tig welded runners. The plenum is of proper volume and the runners are much shorter. Considering that the runners’ overall length includes going through the TGV deletes, the runner length is still pretty long even though the Process West intake is about 4″ shorter than stock.
The bottom of the Process West intake manifold has 5 taps going to the plenum. We are going to put our MAP sensor, intake air temp sensor, and the vacuum references for the fuel pressure regulator and wastegate here, nice and out of the way. The manifold runners bolt to the plenum.
Looking inside the plenum, you can see that the runners have velocity stacks to help smooth the airflow going in. Even with the shorter runners, Process West has tested the manifold on a stock engine and stock turbo and found no increase in lag and no loss of bottom end. On a stock engine, Process West has reported a 9% gain across the powerband. IAG has reported gains of over 40 hp across the board with this manifold on more heavily modded engines.
While we were upgrading our intake manifold, we decided to equip it with IAG’s big throttle body. Usually, the stock throttle body is good for over 500 hp but we just wanted to have the car running on this TB in case we decided to go to a larger rotated mount turbo in the near future. We have felt better response with big throttle bodies on other cars before even though the gains on the dyno were negligible.
The IAG throttle body is 76mm in diameter, much bigger than the stock 60mm. It gives enough flow for 1000 hp. Like we said before, for less than 500 hp it probably doesn’t make much difference.
9 comments
How does this manifold compare to the AMS manifold? The AMS manifold seems to be significantly easier on the budget.
I don’t know, this manifold looked like it would work better and the results the others had were in line with what we wanted. The AMS manifold eliminates the need for TGV deletes which is a nice feature.
Process West has always made great stuff for the Subaru platform, going on almost a couple decades. Their only problem was price (because it’s Australian and the dollar conversion sucks) and not a lot of resellers/marketing it.
Back in the day with the 02 bugeyes and similar years, they made a great top mount with a matching underhood duct. Often copied, I might add. They also had a really slick V mounted front mount intercooler. Rally level like fitment and great construction. But over $3500 USD.
I sometimes miss my Subaru, and then I don’t. 😉
Corsa Veloce vs Process West intake manifold? Now that the Cobb Accessport has bowed to the EPA and TGV’s will need to be kept on, do you plan on going Motec or Haltech?
The two manifolds look very simular. May run simularly, there isnt much data out there on them although they look like they would work well. We are probably use a Link plug and play ECU.
Will the obd2 port work to pass emissions with a link g4x ecu?
You should know the answer to that question.
Thanks for the write up. I’m looking at one of these units, but am not sure how well it’ll fit with the ETS rotated kit since it sits a bit higher…
They have a rear throttle body version for rotated mounts.