After taking a look at the design of the front fog lights & grilles a little while back I decided that the grille on the driver's side of the Polo GTI is really stupid. The flow of air to the intercooler is blocked by plastic coverings, with the air sucked in from the centre of the car and then redirected behind the (hot) fog lamp onto the intercooler. I can't explain why this is the case, but for a car that will be driven hard on more hot days than foggy days, I decided to tweak the grill slightly.

The first step was obviously to remove the obstructions, which meant the plastic between the grille bars was removed, the rear 'deflector' taken off and the fog light taken out. This gave a nice clean flow of air to the intercooler, but fog lights do come in handy (especially in Canberra winters) so I needed to come up with a replacement.

This evening I finally finished the first draft version of those new grilles:







I'm sure we'll get another foggy morning here in the next week so I can try them out in the real world, but from my testing in the garage they seem to have a similar light throw to the standard lamps - perhaps slightly weaker but on the plus side a nice blueish light.

I bought new grilles and used the connector from OEM fog lamps to wire up the LEDs, so the new grilles can be swapped back to the originals in about 2 minutes.

The new design is really only required on the driver's side where the intercooler is mounted, but obviously for symmetry I did the same to both sides.

Although this was a function over form project, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out for a first draft.