2005-2006 Mustang Cold Air Kit Purchase - Conscious About Cold Air

To utilize the ram-air design of the WMS kit, the coolant reservoir needed to be relocated. WMS supplied all of the brackets and hardware needed to move the reservoir from the radiator support to the left-front inner fender. Coincidentally, the reservoir moves to the place where the stock airbox was previously located.

Bowe puts the finishing touches on the radiator cover/ram-air box. The new cover runs all the way up to the throttle body.

The route the air takes to the throttle body is considerably shorter with the WMS kit. Air enters from the grill, travels upward through the openings in the cover, goes through the filter (not bolted on in this photo), and into the throttle body.

The difference in the WMS kits is in the size of the inlet tubes. The larger inlet tube (left) requires the tune that comes in the supplied SCT XCalibrator tuner, while the basic inlet tube (right) doesn't need a tune. Notice the size difference between the tuned version and the non-tuned version.

The WMS kit is bolted up and ready to go. Notice the shorter inlet tube as compared to the other two kits. The location of the filter was good for the lowest IAT of the test, measuring a low 77 degrees, which is cooler than the outside temperature of 82 degrees when the kit was tested.

The WMS kit gave us our best speed of the day at 98.68 and our lowest e.t. at 13.694 seconds. Both of those numbers came from the tuned version of the kit. The non-tuned version ran similarly to the other two, recording a 13.83 best at 98.13 mph.

The hardest part of installing the WMS kit is relocating the coolant reservoir. Moving the reservoir required draining the coolant, so be sure to refill and check the coolant level after the kit is installed.

The two slat-like openings on the WMS radiator support bring fresh air in from the grille. The small openings help promote the velocity of the incoming air, adding to the ram-air effect of the kit.

As was the case with the stock setup and the other two cold-air kits, the MAF sensor was also bolted to the inlet tube. In the case of the WMS kit, there was not a whole lot of inlet tube.

As he did with the Steeda kit, D'Amore loaded up the tune that came with the WMS kit. Using the SCT XCalibrator that came with the kit, it only took D'Amore a few minutes to load the tune, which was supplied directly to WMS by SCT.

Does a cold-air kit really help in the horsepower department? Each kit showed an improve-ment over the baseline num-bers of the stock GT. The numbers can be even better with better weather conditions, as the air worsened as the day went on. This certainly hurt the amount of power gained by the kit, but you should expect at least a 10hp increase by bolting on a cold-air kit.