The brief
The Scirocco had a small oil leak, a bit of weep showing up near the top of the engine and the odd drop. He brought it in expecting the worst, but an oil leak isn't always as complicated as you'd think, and a proper look found a simple one. The culprit was the oil filter housing cap seal. The oil filter on this engine sits in a housing with a screw-on cap, and that cap seals with a rubber O-ring. Over the years the O-ring hardens and shrinks, so it stops sealing cleanly and a little oil weeps out around the cap, runs down, and drips. It's the kind of small leak that's easy to fix once it's found, but it only gets worse if it's left, so the seal needed renewing.
The diagnosis
With the engine cleaned off and run, the leak traced to the oil filter housing cap, oil weeping from around the cap O-ring, not from the sump or the valve cover or anywhere bigger. The rest of the engine's seals checked out dry, so it was the cap seal. That's a simple fix: a fresh O-ring on the oil filter housing cap, fitted properly, with a new oil filter while it's open.
The work
The oil filter housing cap was removed, the cap and the housing cleaned up, the old hardened O-ring replaced with a fresh genuine-spec seal, a new oil filter fitted, and the cap torqued back on to spec. The oil was checked to level and the engine run and checked warm for any weep. A road test confirmed the housing was dry and the level held.
The outcome
No more oil weep near the top of the engine, the oil filter housing sealed and dry, and the oil level holding between checks. The Scirocco went home with the leak sorted at the cheap end of the job. A hardened cap O-ring only weeps worse, but caught early it's a fresh seal and a filter, so it was a quick, tidy fix.