For months now I've been getting increasingly annoyed with the ride quality of the GTi. Regardless of DCC setting it was just too harsh over dips and bumps on the road. Since this is primarily my street car, I wanted the ride quality to be comfortable without sacrificing handling performance. After some research it seemed like the KW Street Comfort coilover setup would solve all these problems. I dropped the car off with
Speedsport Tuning this past weekend so they could finish the install and alignment during the week.
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| KW Street Comfort Installed - 8-26-2020 |
It took about 2 months to get these made and delivered from Germany but it's really worth it. As with all the KW products, the quality is phenomenal. This setup effectively deletes DCC which is fine because frankly DCC doesn't really do much for this car on stock dampers anyway.
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| KW Street Comfort |
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| KW Street Comfort |
I've had Eibach Prokit springs on stock shocks for a few thousand miles now but the car has over 60K miles overall and the springs simply wore out the factory dampers. It's likely that these springs on a fresh set of dampers might have been manageable but they were clearly no good for the tired old ones. The installation went smoothly and I asked the shop to adjust the ride height to be about 1/4 inch higher over my old lowered ride height since it was a bit too low when going up steeper driveways. I also provided fresh bolts and nuts to replace all one-time use hardware.
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| Rear dampers and springs installed |
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| Front dampers and springs installed |
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| Suspension getting installed at SST |
They adjusted the dampers to about 3/4 stiffness. The front adjusters are easy to get to but basically you can't adjust the rear dampers without either cutting a hole in the panels or removing them so I was hoping it wasn't set too stiff. Front camber was maxed out to -1.3 degrees and zero toe. Rear was set to -1 degree of camber and just a hair of toe in.
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| Just the right ride height |
My first impression after driving it the 60 miles or so home is that these are absolutely perfect for my application. It drives exactly how you'd expect a Euro car to drive; firm but critically damped. It soaks up road imperfections without feeling floaty. Even manhole covers no longer make me cringe. Cornering feels excellent. Body roll is minimal and I'd say the ride quality is comparable to the KW Classics I have installed on the 911SC. I really believe this is how the car should've come out of the factory. Even though DCC is deleted so changing the setting from soft to sport doesn't actually change anything anymore, it's fine because it's basically optimal for both these conditions out of box. KW Suspension does it again and for a mixed duty car with primarily street duty, I'd give this an emphatic 10/10 rating. My only wish was that I had done this sooner. This GTi is now absolutely perfect for what I envisioned a hot hatch should be in terms of power, handling and practicality.
Big thanks to John Darley and the Euro techs at SST for the quick turnaround and making sure things were done exactly as I wanted.
Maintenance Update:
Mileage: 60,295
- New KW Street Comfort Suspension
- New Suspension bolts and nuts
