Today we're going to be looking at and installing the C&L Racer Cold Air Intake for 2018 GT
Mustangs.
This is a tune required intake for 2018 GT Mustangs that eliminates any kind of air filter
housing.
It has a separate cast aluminum mass airflow housing and it's very easy to install.
So a stock dyno run on a manual 2018 GT gave us numbers of 433 horsepower and 390 foot-pounds
of torque.
After we installed the C&L cold air intake and paired it with a VMP custom tune, we saw
numbers of 455 horsepower and 398 foot-pounds of torque.
That makes for a peak gain of 22 horsepower and 8 foot-pounds of torque.
What's even more impressive than that though are our curve gains.
We saw curve gains of 26 horsepower at 6700 rpm and 20 foot-pounds of torque both at 3200
rpm and again in the upper rpm range at 6700 rpm.
I'll call it a one out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter.
And I'll show you how to get it on the car now.
To start the install you will need to remove the strut tower brace, you will have to pop
off those two 15-millimeter nuts so you can get to your engine cover.
You'll remove this little plastic cap that's holding your wire harness, so you can get
to this nut.
All right, we're gonna do the same thing over here.
So because your wire harness is over there I'd recommend sliding the strut tower off
this side first, and lift off on the other side.
The next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna wanna pop these two covers off of your engine
cover, that will reveal two 10-millimeter nuts that you'll need to back out so you can
pop your engine cover off.
I'm just gonna do this with a flat head screwdriver and I'm going to leave the nut sitting in
the cover.
I'll just be careful when I pop this off to make sure that the nuts don't go flying out.
All right, so now at this point your engine cover is just going to snap out of place,
it's held in by two little rubber grommets.
So we'll just pull up.
Next I'm gonna to loosen the clamp at the throttle body with a 7-millimeter socket.
From here, I'm gonna disconnect the connections that are on the intake through here.
So, for this first one the way this works is you'll push, and then once you push, this
clip we'll be able push it down and pull off.
So we'll use a pair of pliers to release the clamp on the sound tube.
So if you're lucky, you can get the clamp on the sound tune to lock, which will then
free you to pull it off a little bit easier.
All right, your next connection has a little bit of a different clamp on it, so you'll
find the tab, press down on that tab to release and you'll be able to slide that right off.
Next we'll undo the mass air flow sensor, so there is a little red locking tab on the
bottom that you'll loosen, pull the red tab out, the sensor will release.
Now on the 2018 Mustang, you will need a body panel removal tool to remove this clip from
the airbox.
So, we'll pop our body clip out.
Lastly remove the 10-millimeter bolt that's holding the airbox into place on the fender
here.
After that I'm gonna try to lift this entire intake out as one piece.
So, I'm gonna slide the intake tube off at the throttle body first.
Real quick, if we take a look at the C&L intake on the table here and compare it to our stock
intake, you see a lot of differences.
The C&L really is a basic intake, so it's molded more after performance, I'd say.
It's a lot like the [inaudible 00:04:28] intake in the sense that you don't have an airbox
any longer.
So there's no cold air feed anymore, there's no airbox.
You're literally just getting your roto molded plastic intake tube, a mass air flow housing
and a reusable oiled filter here.
Your big changes are gonna be your reusable filter, so this is an oiled filter and what
this means is that you can just clean this filter, re-oil it and reinstall it, you don't
have to buy a brand new filter every time like you would have to do with a paper filter
of the stock intake.
The other thing is the C&L intake does have a separate aluminum mass air flow housing,
which is a little bit different than a lot of the other designs that you see out there.
So like your stock intake has your mass air flow sensor built into your intake tube, like
most other cold air intake options.
This isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it's actually more like a styling thing in my opinion.
And I think this looks pretty good under the hood.
One thing I will say right now is the C&L Racer intake is a tune required intake, so
you can't just install this and go, you will need to pair this with a tune.
Now we're gonna move on to assembling the C&L cold air intake on the table here before
we drop it in place in the car.
So you can fully assemble this intake because of the style that it has, you can fully assemble
the intake before you drop it in.
C&L gives you a Torx bit and the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna remove
the mass air flow sensor from the factory intake tube.
C&L provides you two Phillips head screws as new hardware for the mass air flow sensor,
so we're just gonna transfer this over into the new MAF housing.
All right, so now we're gonna get the couplers onto the intake tube, so we can assemble the
intake.
So the smaller coupler is gonna go on the throttle body side and we are first going
to make sure we have clamps on her, I'm just gonna slide it in place.
Now these are tight fit so it may take a little bit of working to get this on there.
You'll slide it down into place and there are different sized clamps, your two smaller
clamps are gonna go at the throttle body end and your to larger clamps are gonna go at
your air filter end, or your mass air flow sensor end actually.
So we'll just slide these on, and I'm actually gonna rotate the clamps now, so they're in
a good position when I wanna tighten them.
From here we can then slide the mass air flow sensor housing into place, so we'll slide
that on our coupler.
Rotating the mass air flow sensor housing so that the mass airflow sensor is oriented
in the correct way, because when you install this on the car, you need the sensor to be
facing this way so you can make your electrical connection.
You don't want it pointing up or pointing anywhere else, you kind of want it right in
line with the intake tube.
So you just wanna get the clamps in a position where they have a good grip on the coupler,
and then tighten them down.
All right, and same thing with this clamp, you just wanna make sure your housing is pushed
all the way in, and your clamp's in a good position before you tighten it down.
All right, so we're just gonna tighten our other clamp as well before you get our air
filter into place.
If you're installing this intake on a manual car like we are today, C&L gives you a supplied
cap, and you're gonna cap off the third line on the intake tube right here.
If you're installing on an automatic car you won't need to do this because you'll have
a line that will connect to you.
So from here we're now going to attach our air filter onto the mass air flow housing.
We'll slide that into place and we'll just tighten our clamp down now.
So we're gonna take our last remaining clamp, slide it on the throttle body end here and
we are ready to get the intake installed on the car.
All right, so now we're gonna get our intake in place.
Wanna slide the coupler over the throttle body first, make sure that's seated well and
flush against the throttle body.
So once you have your intake tube and coupler flush against your throttle body, you can
tighten your clamp.
Next we'll plug in all of the connections on the intake tube itself, they'll just snap
into place.
We'll connect the sound tube and then release our clamp.
So now we'll just plug back in our mass air flow sensor, slide it into place, make sure
to push down that locking pad.
So now we'll get the engine cover back into place and bolted down, followed by the strut
tower brace.
So we'll sit this on here first and then we want to make sure that our little rubber grommets
are seated and in place.
All right, so now we'll drop the 10-millimeter nut in place, tighten it down.
These don't need to be too tight.
All right, so now we're gonna clip our covers back into place.
All right, so now we'll got our strut tower brace into place and I will say that it might
be helpful to have a second set of hands here, I would recommend sliding that end in first
since you are going under that harness, and we'll just lay this end in place.
Take our nuts, get them started by hand and then we'll tighten them down.
At this point you're done with the mechanical portion of the install.
Don't forget before you try to start your car to upload your tune, since this is a tune
required intake.
That's gonna wrap up this review and install.
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