Do I need a boost gauge for my Stage 3 Golf 5 GTI?

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There is one thing that has always been a good idea to have on a turbo car and that is a boost gauge. On production cars, it is not needed as they ECU looks after the engine. As soon as you fitted a bigger turbo and run more boost then you need to be able to have a way to see what the boost is doing.

With the newer tuner cars like the Golf 5 GTI and above it isn’t needed. It is more of a nice to have. When you get to stage 3 power levels it is a different story. If you have an issue the first thing the tuners normally ask is at what revs and what boost. You don’t drive around with a laptop plugged in all the time so you can’t answer the question. You go home plug in the laptop to do the log and the issue isn’t there. This is why if you have a boost gauge you can see at what boost the issue shows up.

I decided to get a boost gauge for my Golf 5 GTI. The issue I had was I wanted the gauge to look OEM as far as possible. I did some research on the available options.

I was very tempted to get one of the gauge pods as in the above picture. The thing I just didn’t like about this setup was the gauge was in front of the rev counter. Not a big issue but it would have bothered me too much.

So what other option was there?

I looked around and found another option. This was the OSIR gauge pod that goes into the driver side air vent. You lose the ability to adjust the air vent in the driver side but the gauge looks fairly OEM and the vent still worked. I bought a NewSouth boost gauge as they had the same color scheme as the standard Golf 5 GTI clocks.

**NewSouth Gauge** installed in **OSIR Gauge Pod**

Installing the gauge pod

The hardest part of installing the gauge was getting the tube from the engine bay all the way to the gauge. That is also what took the longest. I made use of the wire connection for the light that is around the lighter in the car for the backlight of the gauge.

The **NewSouth Gauge** installed in the **OSIR Gauge pod**.

Something was missing!

I looked at the installed gauge and it was looking really well! It just looked like something was missing. The standard gauges in the car had a silver ring around the gauge. The fact that the gauge pod did not have this silver ring bothered me a lot. What I did was I designed a ring and got it machined out of aluminum at work. This was going to be the missing part.