I love the expression 'on the home straight' and none more so than this month, for I get to use this very expression - and mean it, for once. At last the blue Mk1 Golf is (to all intents and purpose) complete. Apart from a few minor tweaks, some generous track testing and chassis tuning it's near as damn done.

So this month was awash with spanners and secondary checks, as every nut and bolt was meticulously attended to by Gulf Sport technician Gary, with only thoughts of the two last big jobs to do lurking around the corner. First of all there was the CAE exposed billet Motorsport gear shifter, which arrived two months ago (evo 015). I unpacked it from the box, fiddled with it in the office, even parked it in the Golf's cabin - but never bolted it down, or wired it up. This month, the time had come to measure up the components and drill some holes.

The package included the 1.2kg aviation standard billet aluminium shift tower, two cables, a colour-coded gera knob and a genius billet aluminium adaptor plate. A genius because it allows a cable-shift shift tower (like this) to be adapted to operate an old-fashioned Type020   rod-box like that fitted to the Mk1 Golf. In the past much effort was concentrated on retro-fitting the cable-box from the Corrado in order run the cable transmission, but alas now you can have the best of both worlds with the CAE adaptor-plate. It looks rather basic (with a few crude welds) but beyond the visual simplicity is the work of many light nights burning both ends of the candle.

There is a bit of fabrication required before it will all mate up, but Christian from CAE swiftly dispatched a diagram with all the dimensions and where to cut and paste the select lever. In place, the engine bay now looks rather new-age and - may I say - sophisticated.

Once the plate was grafted on top of the transmission casing, it was time to turn the pages of the 13-page document that had been sent along with the box. The step-by-step instructions (although casually translated) were easy to follow and fairly straightforward, considering.

But before any holes could be drilled to mount the tower, I was summoned to Gulf Sport to measure my arm length, to ensure I could operate the lever efficently whilst strapped down into my fibreglass race seat by those six-point Sabelts. As the CAE tower was custom-made for the Mk1, not only did the platform sit snuggly into the vacant recess left once the old rod-shift lever had been removed, As it happened the drill was only used when a route was required for the heavy-duty shft cables. Once these holes were made, Gary fed them through the bulkhead and connected the two lines to the engine bay aluminium adapter.

Simply instructed or not, there was still a lot of fiddling and modifying in order to get gear selection smoothly aligned, but five hours of tinkering and the cabin is looking rather dashing. ...unlike the engine, which is still not running. The fault was debris in the fuel tank, making it's way through an elderly filter and blocking the pump. Everything has since been flushed out, but until a new gauze filter and a dazzling new fuel pump arrives, the 2-litre 16v can't be fired up.