Photo: Peter Bjorck/YouTube ( Screengrab

Manor Formula One racing team recently sold off a bunch of its crap in an auction, and YouTuber Peter Bjorck managed to snag a bit of advanced Ferrari engine tech: namely an intercooler he planned to install into his Lamborghini. Here’s a look at the innards of that liquid-to-air Masterpiece Of A Heat Exchanger.


The great thing about Formula One cars is that pretty much every single part on them looks ridiculously badass, and when you dismantle each part and look closer, the smaller bits of that badass-looking part almost always look as if they’d been beautifully machined by the fabricating gods.

Take that intercooler in the image above; it looks like an evil horned-robot from a distance—way cooler than any intercooler I’ve ever seen. But when Peter Bjorck breaks into it and exposes its beautifully polished surfaces, things get even prettier:

What’s especially cool is the actual core of the heat exchanger, which Peter Bjork says consists of over 16,000 tubes (microtubes). Those tubes contain liquid that has been cooled off by oncoming air in a different heat exchanger, and whose job it is to cool post-turbo-compressor air before it enters the combustion chamber. Here’s a look at the little tubes:

Photo: Peter Bjorck/YouTube ( Screengrab


Peter Bjork removes the side covers (which contain silicone o-rings to hold in the liquid), and shows the passes the liquid makes through the many microtubes tubes before exiting the intercooler. The YouTuber says that, in total, coolant passes through the charge air cooler (another name for intercooler) four times. Here’s a look at two of the “passes”:

Photo: Peter Bjorck/YouTube ( Screengrab

And this is the intake-air side of the air-to-liquid heat exchanger:

Photo: Peter Bjorck/YouTube ( Screengrab


Watch the entire video above to see more of the shiny, beautifully machined Formula One intercooler. Sure, it’s just a small piece of a highly complex Formula One car, but it’s still a beautiful bit of hardware. Plus, it’s always a treat to get an up-close look at a Formula One part that probably cost more than most cars for sale on Craigslist.