I picked up my car yesterday from USP Motorsports after they installed a new Southbend Stage 2 Endurance clutch and OEM flywheel.
First a shoutout to USP, their work was excellent as always, dropped my car off at 8 am and it was ready at 4 pm. If you are in the Dade, Broward or Palm Beach counties in South Florida, this is the shop to go to. All the work they've done on my car over the years has been top notch and they have never let me down unlike the local Audi dealer *cough* *cough*
I'm just gonna go right out and say a clutch upgrade is a MUST HAVE if you're at Stage 2 and up, hell even if you're at Stage 1. I can't even imagine using the stock clutch with a K04. The car can be driven with the stock clutch but any sort of hard driving and you really just become a ticking time bomb until you start getting the first slips. Let's be honest, we upgrade these cars to push them and if you can't do that then where did the fun go? Even when my car was at Stage 1 I felt the stock clutch just couldn't put down the power really well and felt sloppy during moderate launches, forget about launching the car hard. When I went to Stage 2+ and got the updated version from APR last year, it really was pushing the stock clutch to it's absolute limit. Again this was just my impression of the stock clutch paired with my driving style but it felt a lot weaker overall compared to other manual cars I've owned even when it was new.
To set the stage, my car had been having boost leak and power issues for a while until it finally just shit the bed and didn't want to run one morning. In the end, my stock K03 turbo failed. I found a used one and had USP install it. This brought the power WAY back up and it felt like the first time you go to Stage 1. Of course all good things come to an end...
After driving it with the new turbo for 1 WEEK, about a month ago I was coming home from work and there's this long curve that merges into a highway that I like to take at 3rd gear and then just accelerate out of the corner. As I start to accelerate like I always do, I get the first slip. The clutch just didn't grab and the revs shot all the way up and bounced off the rev limiter. Oh no! I thought, this can't be, it was a fluke. I slowed down and tried again to accelerate but the car was just not going anywhere. Once I got off the highway I came to the realization that my clutch had finally reached it's end of life. Any gear above 2nd would slip if you even just push the accelerator past a quarter of it's full motion.
I had to have my car back to performing like it should so I pulled the trigger on the Southbend Stage 2 Endurance Clutch. I did a lot of research and asked around to determine what clutch to buy. I decided on Southbend because I heard a lot of good things about them from a lot of people and several 600 HP+ cars that get serviced at USP have Southbend clutches. I even think their B5 S4 race car uses a Southbend clutch. If it's good enough for those kind of monsters it's good enough for my little A4. I went with their Stage 2 clutch because of the torque rating (440 ft lbs) and since I'm not done upgrading my car, I want to have room to grow. The Southbend clutch uses the OEM Dual Mass flywheel, I wasn't going to replace the flywheel but RockAuto had a new OEM flywheel for an amazing price ($550) so I couldn't resist. It's a big job so get it done right the first time. Of course I looked into getting a single mass flywheel because they are lighter and the car will rev faster, however USP recommended against it. The car will chatter and shake at low RPM's so I didn't want to deal with that. If anyone has a single mass flywheel, please chime in and give us your impressions.
After picking up the car, I drove it home gently but I could feel immediately the grabbing power of this clutch. The pedal feel and engagement points are stock like but just very firm. The car under light throttle just glides through the revs and speeds up very quickly. When you change gears the tach needle just blips between revs kinda like a DSG. It's an amazing feeling. This has to be the best mod I've done to my car so far. After 50 city miles, I still got a long way to go until it's broken in properly, however I'll be updating this thread with my impressions of the clutch throughout it's life.
Here are some pics of my old clutch and flywheel:
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Originally Posted by petraman
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