Time to Supercharge the Polo!

By Clinton HulleyVW Polo Classic Project Car
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This may sound corny now. When I first heard the words supercharger and Turbo I thought it was a sales gimmick. I didn’t have a clue what it was. Weber side drafts and the throttle bodies were the only performance intakes I was exposed to till now. The VW Polo was really running well. It was fun to drive slow and quiet and suddenly putting your foot down and the car starts to roar. If people were walking in the road towards the car they would jump out of the road although they were quite a distance from the car. The car’s sound was just amassing, and the car revved so smoothly. You wouldn’t say there was a 298 deg cam in this car.


Change the wheels…

One of my friends also had a Polo classic but it was a 1.6 liter. His engine was standard. He only had 50-millimeter free-flow exhaust and Bro-speed downpipes fitted to the car. He visited me one day and he had a set of 17″ mags fitted to his polo. The car looked really great! I looked at my polo and the 15″ TSW Imola’s was just not doing it for me anymore. So I had a set of 17″ TSW APEX fitted to the Polo.

This mags completely transformed the look of the Polo. The wheel nicely filled the arches. The Bigger\wider wheels also helped with getting more grip.

What was my friend doing?

My friend told us he took his polo in for an upgrade. He didn’t want to tell us what he was doing. It was 2 to 3 weeks later and heard a sound I haven’t heard before. It was my friend that pulled in by my place with his Polo. The car had like a wining sound to it. I asked him what made the sound. He told me it was a supercharger. It was a Toyota SC12 charger that was fitted to the polo. He took me for a drive in the car and the Polo pulled like a train, it was really strong. The sounds that the car was making was insane.

At this stage, the whole concept of boost was new to me. I still liked my naturally aspirated cars so I didn’t really want to go that route. My friend said the following words “If you drive a car with boost you will get hooked”. I told him I am a naturally aspirated guy and I love my throaty high revving cars. One day I took my friend’s polo for a spin and guess what. I was hooked. I would lay at night thinking about how I could build the ultimate sleeper.

Can I also fit a supercharger?

My friend got so hooked to boost that he sold his Polo and bought himself a 1.8T A3 Audi. I did some research on superchargers and found out that superchargers are a very expensive route to go. I didn’t want to use the SC12 charger that my friend had on his 1.6l Polo. The SC12 charger is matched with a 1.6-liter engine. If I had to fit one of those on my 2-liter engine the charger would not make much boost. It was only delivering like a 0.3 bar boost on the 1.6 liter Polo.


I went to one of your local spare shops that import motors. It is the same place where I bought the Toyota throttle bodies from. I had a look around for engines that come out with superchargers, like the Mercedes Kompressor engines. Those engines the guys did not want to strip. The one guy asked me why don’t I use the Toyota charger? I told the guy that the SC12 is going to be too small as I am running a 2-liter engine. The guy then told me that there is an SC14 as well that will do the job. They had a lot of those chargers in stock as they strip them off the engines and sell the engines without the chargers.

This was a really nice little unit and it had an electro-mechanical clutch on it. The charger could disengage when you don’t want to run the charger. This was the start of a lot of ideas. Me not knowing that much about superchargers at this stage just meant the sky was the limit…



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