We have finished installing this kit and thought its a good idea to bring the issues we had to everyone attention so people are aware of what they might have to deal with if considering buying this kit.

For a bit of background, we are a Tuning shop in New Zealand, having been in business since 1991 with dyno facilities. and have been working on these cars for a while. I have 2 Audi trained technicians working here, one who is an RS Master Tech. We have also fitted most kits available to RS4/5 B7 & B8 such as JH Motorsport, TTS Tuning, PES/Verstarkt Gen1 & 2 superchargers.

Its important to note we have fabrication facilities on site, with a machine shop next door that can CNC manufacture parts, so we were able to remedy the issues to the kit but obviously at an additional cost, which unfortunately is a cost to our company as we tried to do right by our customer and all communications to VPS via email, phone calls, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, have all fallen on deaf ears, with no reply. This may be harder for the DIY installer without the same facilities as ours.Delivery/manufacturing times

We initially placed the order for the supercharger in July last year, paid upfront. So ended up waiting 10 months for the kit to arrive at our shop, we received all the excuses which were the owner of VPS catching Covid multiple times, factory in China that manufactures their parts being closed due to covid, staff issues, wrong parts being ordered etc, etc. The kit finally arrived, albeit missing the HPFP kit we ordered along with it, but all contact to VPS to remedy this and send us a kit has not been returned.

Supercharger Problems

• Supercharger clearance was off, first was that the charge cooler cores were sitting proud so the supercharger plate wouldn't seal, we found one of the end tanks on the core was welded crooked so the o-ring wouldn't sit in properly, required cutting off end plates and re-welding straight, we also had to linish the welds and cores down to fit.
  • When the Supercharger was bolted to the plate it was bowing it out as it was fouling on the supercharger itself, we had to clearance the plate to make it fit.
  • Charge cooler end tanks. First issue was the o-ring's supplied were too big and were wrong for the end tanks. Second, the CNC end plates on the end of the charge cooler with O-ring bosses were not welded on straight so they didn't fit the supercharger correctly, and third the end plates were incorrectly machined and wrong fittings supplied. The taped holes for AN coolant fittings were machined to close to the edge of the of o-ring boss's resulting in very little material left, causing the O-ring boss to crack and pull away, closer look found the threads cut had broken through the other side. We ended up having to cut off and have new plates with o-ring bosses CNC manufactured with the coolant fitting holes machined closer together and re-welded to remedy.
• ​​​​​​Heat Exchanger, The tabs to mount heat exchanger were welded incorrectly in the wrong plate. Remedy was to cut and re-weld in place to fit heat exchanger correctly.
• Water Pump supplied wasn't going work, the pump had 4 pins and when plugged in it would run, we checked and found that pump required a 5v speed pulse signal to control pump speed (usually controlled of an aftermarket ECU), we had to source another pump locally that would work off a straight 12v supply.
• Water reservoir supplied did not fit at all, was different to one in the installation instructions. Couldn't find anything locally so ended up making one in house to fit
• Missing parts, not enough coolant hose was supplied, we required an extra 3.5m (11.5 feet), and only one size of hose was supplied where 2 different sizes are required. Missing tee fitting, seals etc. Also there was not enough bolts supplied in the kit, for example 14 bolts required of different lengths to bolt the plates together, only 6 bolts of one size supplied, we had to measure bolt depths to workout what sizes we needed and sourced.
• Supercharger bypass valve failure. Once supercharger had been fitted we finished tuning on dyno, everything was looking good until the next day the car started hunting under idle, we smoked tested the system to look for leaks and found the supercharger bypass valve had failed and was leaking internally on the vacuum side sucking air into the manifold causing the idle to hunt. We fixed this by replacing the valve with the factory actuator for the manifold flap control and fabricating a bracket to make it fit.

The cost to us was around 34 hours of additional labour to fix parts, plus around $1500NZ in additional parts, materials and external machining costs.

We have contact VPS for their reply on this but have had nothing back from them. I am not sure whats changed as we have fitted their kits before with no issues other than the previous kit having issues with the top plate sealing on the o-ring supplied but was fixed by applying silicone gasket to the top plate. As mentioned, I am not sure if its because they have moved manufacturing to China and have really bad quality control, but I hope this post is a warning to anyone looking to buy this kit as its very expensive, and at the price it is, would seem to be a premium product.