A tranny cooler is only necessary for an auto. They are more comlicated and can heat up under heavy use.

I am going to be lazy and quote the grand national site on pressure drop as it is very well written. I hate to repeat things that are better said than I can. Go to http://www.gnttype.org/techarea/turbo/intercooler.html for more info on intercoolers.

Pressure Drop
Another aspect of intercoolers to be considered is pressure drop. The pressure read by a boost gauge is the pressure in the intake manifold. It is not the same as the pressure that the turbocharger itself puts out. To get a fluid, such as air, to flow there must be a difference in pressure from one end to the other. Consider a straw that is sitting on the table. It doesn't having anything moving through it until you pick it up, stick it in your mouth, and change the pressure at one end (either by blowing or sucking). In the same way the turbo outlet pressure is higher than the intake manifold pressure, and will always be higher than the intake pressure, because there must be a pressure difference for the air to move.

The difference in pressure required for a given amount of air to move from turbo to intake manifold is an indication of the hydraulic restriction of the intercooler, the up pipe, and the throttle body. Let's say you are trying to move 255 gram/sec of air through a stock intercooler, up pipe, and throttle body and there is a 4 psi difference that is pushing it along (I'm just making up numbers here). If your boost gauge reads 15 psi, that means the turbo is actually putting up 19 psi. Now you buy a PT-70 and slap on some Champion heads. Now you are moving 450 gm/sec of air. At 15 psi boost in the intake manifold the turbo now has to put up 23 psi, because the pressure drop required to get the higher air flow is now 8 psi instead of the 4 that we had before. More flow with the same equipment means higher pressure drop. So we put on a new front mount intercooler. It has a lower pressure drop, pressure drop is now 4 psi, so the turbo is putting up 19 psi again. Now we add the 65 mm throttle body and the pressure drop is now 3 psi. Then we add the 2.5" up pipe, and it drops to 2.5 psi. Now to make 15 psi boost the turbo only has to put up 17.5 psi. The difference in turbo outlet temperature between 23 psi and 17.5 psi is about 40 deg (assuming a constant efficiency)! So you can see how just by reducing the pressure drop we can lower the temperatures while still running the same amount of boost.

I have seen some misunderstandings regarding intercooler pressure drop and how it relates to heat transfer. For example, one vendor's catalog implies that if you had little or no pressure drop then you would have no heat transfer. This is incorrect. Pressure drop and heat transfer are relatively independent, you can have good heat transfer in an intercooler that has a small pressure drop if it is designed correctly. It is easier to have good heat transfer when there is a larger pressure drop because the fluid's turbulence helps the heat transfer coefficient (U), but I have seen industrial coolers that are designed to have less than 0.2 psi of drop while flowing a heck of a lot more air, so it is certainly feasible.

Pressure drop is important because the higher the turbo discharge pressure is the higher the temperature of the turbo air. When we drop the turbo discharge pressure we also drop the temperature of the air coming out of the turbo. When we do that we also drop the intercooler outlet temperature, although not as much, but hey, every little bit helps. This lower pressure drop is part of the benefit offered by new, bigger front mount intercoolers; by the Duttweiler neck modification to stock location intercoolers; by bigger up pipes; and by bigger throttle bodies. You can also make the turbo work less hard by improving the inlet side to it. K&N air filters, free flowing MAF pipes, removing a screen from the MAF, removing the MAF itself when switching to an aftermarket fuel injection system, the upcoming 3" and 3.5" MAFs from Modern Muscle, these all reduce the pressure drop in the turbo inlet system which makes the compressor work less to produce the same boost which will reduce the turbo discharge temperature (among other, and probably greater, benefits).

05 Mazda RX-8
06 Lotus Elise