The 1.6 turbo used in the Citroen DS3, the Peugeot RCZ and the 207 GTI is a compact engine, and the cars built around it are compact too. That combination produces an engine bay where every pipe has to be shaped deliberately, and where a hose that sits a few millimetres out of position can rub against something within a few hundred kilometres.
Owners come to intake work on these cars for the usual reasons: the original hose has aged, the induction noise could be better, or a change elsewhere in the system has left the intake as the weak point. All three are legitimate starting points.
The intake hose on these cars runs from the airbox area towards the turbo inlet, and it has to clear the engine, the battery box and the surrounding pipework on the way. The original part is moulded, which is exactly why a generic length of silicone tube rarely fits well.
A moulded replacement keeps the routing as designed. Where the angle at one end is wrong, the hose will either kink slightly at rest or pull under load, and both problems tend to worsen quietly before an owner notices them.
Our intake hose and induction kit work for the DS3, RCZ and 207 GTI is built to the original routing for precisely that reason.
Rubber hardens with heat cycling, and on a small turbo engine the intake hose sits close to a lot of hot metal. Add oil vapour from the breather system and the material loses flexibility faster than most owners expect.
Once the hose hardens it can also start to collapse under suction at the inlet. That failure is easy to miss, because a hose that collapses under load looks perfectly normal with the engine switched off.
A reinforced silicone replacement resists both problems. The reinforcement holds the shape under suction, and the material handles heat and oil vapour far better than aged rubber.
There are two sensible approaches on this platform. One keeps the factory airbox and replaces the restrictive parts of the path with better-flowing equivalents. The other replaces the airbox with an open filter and a dedicated intake pipe.
The hose-only route keeps the car quiet and consistent, and it suits owners who want reliability rather than a change in character. The induction kit route changes the sound noticeably and gives a cleaner path, at the cost of drawing air from inside the engine bay unless a cold-air feed is retained.
Neither is wrong. The decision should follow what the owner wants from the car, not the other way round.
An intake does not work alone. The air it delivers goes through the turbo, the charge pipes and the intercooler before it reaches the engine, and a restriction anywhere in that chain limits what the intake can contribute.
Where a customer is already planning other work, it makes sense to look at the whole path at once. The pipework and the flexible joints are usually the parts with the most room for improvement on a car of this age.
Across the DS3, the RCZ and the 207 GTI, the engine is shared but the surrounding structure is not. The airbox position, the battery location and the routing of adjacent hoses all differ slightly between models and between production years.
We confirm the exact model and year before recommending a shape, and where the car has already been modified we work from what is fitted. On a hatchback that may have changed hands several times, that is the only reliable starting point.
One more fitment note is worth making here. These engines are used in several body styles, and the bonnet line and the front structure differ enough between them that the airbox sits differently under the bonnet. A part that clears everything on one model can come very close on another, so we check the specific car rather than trusting the engine designation alone.
The hard parts of an intake system on these cars are the aluminium sections, and those are TIG welded by hand. The flexible sections are reinforced silicone, shaped to the original routing.
Where a customer wants a specific finish on the metal parts, that is a finishing decision rather than a performance one, and we say so rather than implying otherwise. Every mould is tested and measured before anything is produced in quantity.
Five questions cover almost everything on this platform.
Photographs of the engine bay, taken from both sides, settle nearly all of these. From there the recommendation is usually immediate, and the part can be made to the routing the car actually has.
Intake work is most effective when the parts around it are considered together. You can see what we build on our air intakes page, browse the flexible parts under performance silicone hose, confirm your own car under shop by vehicle, review the sections further down the system on our exhaust pipe page, and read how custom work starts on customization.
