The Best of 2021, #4: Testing The CSF VF Engineering A90 A91 Supra Intake Manifold Intercooler

Here you can see some of the features machined in the plenum of the manifold for clearance with the oil filter.   The oil filter can be removed without touching the intake manifold. The bulge was CFD inspired to help equalize flow from cylinder to cylinder.  CFD helps the designer to add aerodynamic features to help with the flow that are not normally intuitive.

A close-up of some of the machining details to make sure that the manifold can accommodate every OEM sensor, fitting, hose, and bracket.

To test the CSF/VF intake manifold, we first hooked up thermocouples in the stock manifold before and after the internal intercooler to test temperature drop across the core.  We also measured the water temperature into and out of the water to air heat exchanger in the nose of the car for the manifolds intercooler brick.  You might wonder why not just do an air to air front mount intercooler conversion? On a Supra there is very little room and not much grille opening to be able to do such a conversion effectively.

We then strapped our test car to VF Engineering’s chassis dyno to begin the test on the stock manifold/intercooler.  Thank you to Studio RSR for lending us their time attack winning A90 Supra to do our testing on.

Fans were positioned to force air through every grille opening in the front of the car equally.