New suspension ordered

Its that time, the suspension is now being replaced. With just a hair under 90k miles on it, its held up extremely well but is now showing its age. The GLI now has a slight body roll when taking corners and it is exaggerating its flow over bumps a little.

Unlike most of the VW community my focus is not on going so low my subframe scrapes the ground but instead finding the best performance to price ratio for a daily driver. It was a little hard finding reliable information due to how abundant the “m0ar low” people there are out there in the VW community, but I think I have it.

I decided to go the Koni FSD shocks and Eibach springs kit. They offerer a soft ride for commuting daily while still having the performance handling the GLI deserves. Eibach is a trusted name and wont lower the car too much and give what I hope is the right stiffness. Lowering a car too much will almost always hinder the performance of the kit installed. The shocks don’t have the follow through to do their dampening job properly and the ride just becomes bouncy or abrupt when you hit the bump stops or the shock just hits itself. In most cases going too low with typical shocks like Bilstein and Koni will even lower the life of the them because they are out of their designed ride height spectrum. The sad part is that most of these coil over kits that are sub $1000 actually give you worse performance than the stock suspension. But if looks are your thing they work great, its just not for me.

The Koni FSD shocks are what really sold the kit. FSD stands for Frequency Selective Damping, they added “a special valve, which controls an oil flow parallel to the one going through the piston rod. This parallel oil flow is closed by the FSD feature, giving a rise in damping force almost linear to the time that the piston is moving in one direction.” Here is a link to the full description of what goes on: How Koni FSD shocks work They should be perfect for Performance to daily driver ratio. They are a bit more expensive than Koni Yellows or Bilstein Sports but I believe they will suit my needs better.

I ended up ordering the kit from MJM Autohaus

Coincidently it does come with a torque mount which I needed anyways. The GLI is still running the original one and I am sure replacing it can help some of the engine movement.

I will update again once I have them, they are currently back ordered due to a recent sale.