First a huge thanks to some folks on the mk1 forum, gokart3 and RussS, for assisting with this and the other projects last weekend. Always fun to be able to throw the car up on stands for a couple days and wrench through a couple of projects.
Also, many thanks to William for putting this kit together! It's not very often that an enthusiast will go through this kind of development effort, all the way through engaging with an industry leader for manufacturing, and bring a kit to market. And the parts really are top notch; the collars and perches for the rear springs are beautifully machined.
Getting the car in the air and properly supported is a bit tricky. I needed to have the weight off of the front control arms entirely since those were removed for another project. This meant lifting the front end up and placing the stands under the control arm brackets to start. And then one side at a time using two jacks to swap the stand from the control arm bracket to the factory lift points. The rear is much easier to deal with. I placed the stands under the rear subframe mount all the way back by the exhaust. Having high quality, flat topped stands is a bonus but this would be soooo much easier with a lift.
Install was very straightforward. I've been through numerous coilover installs on mk1 TTs and this was very similar. I chose to not pull the hub off of the axle and instead use a strut spreader tool to open the collar on the hub and slide the strut out. Here you can see the spreader in place, the 14mm triple square bolt removed, and a liberal helping of PB Blaster to help the strut release.
There's a tab on the strut body that is used to orient the strut in the hub assembly. This will get hung up on the strut spreader so once you move the strut up a bit you'll need to reposition the spreader below the tab to continue.
Here's the collar opened all the way. When reinstalling the strut you'll have to take the same approach with the spreader and move it to allow the tab to pass by. Make sure the strut is fully seated all the way down into the collar before bolting everything back up!
With the upper strut bolts loosened a bit and with the swaybar disconnected you should be able to angle the control arm down far enough and slide the strut up and out. This is definitely a two person affair. And DON'T FORGET TO DISCONNECT THE ELECTRIC HARNESS from the bottom of the strut. Almost had an epic oops ;)
The three upper strut bolts are so much easier to deal with than the stacked assembly on the mk1.
The strut is then disassembled using spring compressors and reassembled on a bench out of the car. I finally found some 21mm ratcheting pass-thru sockets to make it easier to remove the top locking nut. I still dislike that arrangement but seems pretty common for a Macpherson strut.
The rear springs are much easier to do. With the lower link supported by a jack you can remove the lower bolt that connects to the hub assembly. If you very slowly raise the jack you'll find an angle where the load is taken off of the bolt and it will come out quite easily, don't force this if you can help it.
There was not enough spring tension to unstick the arm so it needed some persuasion with a deadblow hammer. Remove the stock spring and spring seat and get the MSS spring assembled correctly and put back in place. Note that you only reuse the bottom OEM seat.
Ride heights will vary from car-to-car (and depend on the driver's weight ;) but I ended up having the driver side perch set at 3/8" and the passenger perch at 1/2". This gave me 1/8" rake with me in the car and 3/4 tank of gas. We found that the passenger side height adjustment affected the other three corners more than the driver side.
Once it was on the ground and has had some miles on it I did a final rake adjustment and got it aligned. The car only lowered about 1/8" all around although I guess that may settle a bit more over time. What was really impressive is that my baseline alignment numbers when I brought the car in were almost exactly where they were after the car was aligned 18months ago. That is to say, with removing the dampers and replacing the springs it all basically went back together exactly where it was previously. There's just much less slack in the assembly of the mk2 than in the mk1.
Driving Impressions:
As I mentioned in the Superpro bushing review I've missed the go-cart like handling that my mk1 TT had. That immediate turn-in that the pre-recall arms and H&R coilovers provided. The stiff springs in that kit really helped counter weight transfer and aim the car into the corners. The mk1 also had much less bodyroll through corners than the mk2 and overall just felt more agile. The RS has more outright grip no doubt but at slower speeds could feel lazy and dare I say it boring.
The MSS kit does exactly what I wanted. The car feels agile and darty and at slower speeds is much more engaging to drive. The nose turns in right-freaking-now and stays hooked up through the corner. Even in normal mode there's very little body roll, I'd say comparable to what there was in sport previously. I've had a few instances where I was in normal mode and thought I was in sport because of how well the car was responding :) The RS for me has always done this nice trick of rotating through corners under throttle. Not full on tail-out oversteer or anything, just a sense of pouring thru the turn. Get the car turned in and start to roll on the throttle from apex out and it feels like the yaw center moves backwards thru the car as weight and power transfer to the rear. I absolutely love nailing a corner and getting that sensation and it's much easier and more pronounced with the MSS setup.
It's been interesting that the effect on the feel of the chassis extends beyond just cornering. The much reduced dive and squat (as in zero in sport) make acceleration feel that much more immediate. You can even sense this on downshifts as you lift off the throttle to rev-match and get less front-end dive. The whole car feels more direct and taut just in typical daily driving. As I said, it just feels more engaging all of the time.
Ride is firmer than stock but not any more harsh. I don't sense any additional tramlining, no new creaks or rattles. It's just as comfortable as before in normal mode. Sport is pretty stiff but it does have less of an edge than the stock springs. That high frequency jittering is toned way down. With that filtered out you get a much better sense of what the road surface is like. I know some people have said that the MSS springs make sport more usable day-to-day and that's probably true but I also think that it's just as likely that MSS has improved the normal mode so much that sport will be less necessary except for occasions when you want absolute body control and immediate chassis response.
So yes, after all this time I am very very pleased with the results. The MSS kit fits well with my overall mod program for the RS. I wanted to be careful about keeping the overall character of the car intact but just turn the dial up a bit. Just make it a bit sharper and more connected. The springs have done exactly that and with no downside that I can tell.
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