Pro Alloy is one of the first motorsport companies worldwide to develop a radiator upgrade for the MK3, all designed, tested and built in our UK manufacturing facility using our own MK3 development vehicle. This has given us the opportunity to carry out some long term durability & performance testing with our first development radiator which clocked up in excess of 20,000 road and track miles. As with most modern production cars the standard front end packaging is very compact with all the available space being used very efficiently. This creates a number of challenges when trying to design an up-rated unit which fits without the need to modify the car. Due to these factors it was quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be space within the constraints of the standard cooling hardware to install a radiator which has a huge increase in surface area. Our connections with the Ford design team and engineers confirmed that the cooling performance of the standard set-up was actually pretty effective with the standard cars running close to thermostat opening point even under full load. They did however highlight that flow rates around the system are critical, and a reduction in flow through the radiator could affect water flow down to the Power Transfer Unit (PTU) which could cause reliability issues. This therefore ruled out building a multi pass radiator as this could cause too greater flow restriction and potentially create issues with the cooling of the PTU. Due to these factors we have focused on looking for gains in surface area, internal water flow around the system, and reliability. As most tuned and modified cars are likely to be fitted with larger, up-rated intercoolers the ambient airflow to the radiator can be compromised, we have therefore increased the tube pitching of the new radiator core to maintain good ambient airflow through the radiator and with an increase in core thickness of 11%, achieved a gain in internal water flow of 5%. The increases we were able to make to the frontal area of the core ultimately giving an increase in surface area of 4.5%. The new Pro Alloy radiator is of an all aluminium construction and is skilfully TIG welded by our highly trained engineers. Being aluminium there are no plastic end tanks like the ones found on the original Ford unit - This mass produced style of radiator is always a weak point in any cooling system as the plastic is well known for bursting or cracking. This new radiator upgrade is the perfect addition to our ever expanding range of Focus RS MK3 products and has been designed to give improved performance and reliability on both modified and completely standard cars. Our skilled engineers have replicated all the original mounting points to enable a really simple installation and the standard fan assembly to be refitted just like the OE unit. This upgrade is available in either satin silver or satin black.
