Water to Air Intercooler using A/C System as cooler

[Morphious]

I'm building a mud racing truck out of an old beat up 96 dodge 3/4 ton 4x4 12 valve, and will be rebodying the truck to put a 46 dodge powerwagon body on it. This leaves me with a few design issues I need to work through on the truck. The one this post deals with is a solution for an intercooler. The nose cone of the truck has a 22" x 22" area for a radiator or intercooler to fit in it. I'm planning on relocating the radiator to the bed of the truck with electric fans. For the intercooler, I'm planning on using that nose cone space for a water to air intercooler. I can fit a decent sized w/a intercooler in that space.

Now cooling the water is what this post is about. The quick and simple solution is to run a water pump to pump water through a box full of ice to chill the water before it enters the intercooler, I can put the box of ice in the cab of the truck or in the bed of the truck and that would work fine, would need to ensure the water is drained fully before winter time, but that's a small issue. I'd be stuck hauling 20 or 30lbs of ice to each race event. The mud runs are 100 to 200 feet long and can be run in 5 to 40 seconds depending on the consistency of the pit and depth of the mud. So the ice method would work fine for this.

But that wouldn't be the redneck way would it? I've got the A/C system on the 96 that I can use or remove, what I'd like to do is use the A/C system to pre-chill about 20 gallons of water before a run using the evaporator of the A/C system and control the operation of the compressor by a toggle switch in the cab, and a switch for the pump to cycle the water when racing.

Has anyone attempted or tried this?

Morph.