What's left to do? Not much, thankfully.

Today we buttoned up the intake side of the kit and trimmed the engine cover to fit over the new components.

The VF intake is simple, but effective. Utilizing a high-flow filter element, the intake is able to draw more than enough air to suit the bigger turbo. As you might imagine, an engine bay can get pretty hot during stop and go traffic, so VF incorporates a heat shield that properly seats against the underside of the hood when it's closed.

Believe it or not, trimming the airbox turned out to be one of the more time consuming tasks we undertook. Unlike past VW engine covers, the version used by the new GTI doubles as the factory "airbox" and filter element. As such, there's quite a bit of bulky plastic under the outer skin, and that needs to be trimmed in order to clear the new intake assembly. With dremel tool in hand, it was just a matter of measure, trim, measure, trim, etc. Keeping in mind that the goal here was to make the end result look as OE as possible, we trimmed slowly and only as much as absolutely necessary. We're quite pleased with the end result and more importantly, so is our customer.

With the installation now complete, it's time to put some miles on the car, data-log some critical factors and then go over all our work to make sure nothing is interfering with something else and that nothing has worked it's way loose. More on that next time...