Sonic

Yeah that's not bad. I thought you meant £230 just for the fronts for some reason That also from Nitrac?

The only real consideration for the rear is wear and durability, as they're more of a ballache to replace How much were the ds2500 fronts and strada rears? I might be tempted as my next set over OEM

From Carbotech. Just drop Ian an email. XP8 on the golf was £210 all-in for front, £190 rear plus delivery and i had a set of uber cheap mintex pads sent to use the backing plates. To be honest i'll probably just go back to OEM as although the braking force is phenomenal it's rarely needed on the road, they're rarely up to temp, and the noise gets very annoying for the rest of the time.

I'm running Carbotech XP8, but they have a tendency to squeal. I actually think XP10 would be less noisy. I've also not been able to find anything beyond OEM, but Carbotech will make whichever compound you want if you send them some backing plates (or cheap mintex pads, in my case). I'd just run OEM as they don't do too much braking, although i find the rears wear quicker than the fronts. Also you can definitely feel the extra braking capacity from the XPS during corning with a better compound when up to temp, which i hadn't considered!

I couldn't see another tyre thread around here, apologies if one exists, but i'm always very interested to hear what other people make of tyres. My R came with the Bridgestone Potenza S001 225/40/18 which i really rated actually, they weren't that durable (only lasting 4k under some fast road driving) but had predictable levels of grip and handled well in both the dry and the rain. I then shod the beast with Michelin Pilot Super Sports which are, in my opinion, the best all-round summer road tyre. They have lasted more like 9k fast road miles which is pretty impressive considering, wear is brilliant compared to other tyres, and peak grip in the dry is phenomenal. Wet weather running is also fantastic, but they didn't last very long at all on a sprint circuit without overheating, so they're certainly not a track tyre. I now have some Federal 595RSR 235/40/18 to fit which i really rate as a split track/road tyre for maximum affordability. They come with loads of tread, and although they don't provide the peak grip of something like a Dunlop Direzza DZ03G, they're half the cost and last longer! I also have a set of Michelin Pilot Sport 4 in the garage to try which are supposed to be very good and an evolution from the MPSS, but perhaps with a slightly caveat for peak grip on track, which they won't be used for as i didn't rate the MPSS for track anyway given the very soft sidewalls and tendency to overheat quickly. I also have a set of the Nankang NS-2R's to try which a few friends rate highly for dry weather running, peak grip and and durability. I expect these to be similar to the Federal 595RSR, so it'll be interesting to see as they're usually a similar price (although currently very cheap at about £83 each!) I'm heading to Spain next month for some fun driving, so i'll hopefully get to try 2 or maybe 3 sets in that time... What about other people... what are your thoughts on tyres you've used on the R?

Its an MY15 car with the older MDI port, not USB (without the cable) so i guess MIB1?

Sorry Rick, i didn't mean to imply you were at all, simply i was just trying to clarify that i consider MRC to be in the APR/Revo bracket of high-end tuners with years of experience and spending lots of time developing their products, rather than having some kid who can use MS Word trying to write their "custom remaps" using some off-the-shelf tuning software where you can change a few settings I've seen Minhea work first-hand custom mapping some older VAG cars before user-friendly software existed, and it is very impressive. I also rate Doug and the other chaps in the garage very highly for any work.

Absolutely! I swear by it used as a normal shampoo, and tend to use the valet pro snow foam, designed specifically for the job, for a dedicated foam pre-rinse.

Even after owning the car for a year i've learnt some new stuff reading this thread I can't wait to have my passenger-side mirror dip in reverse! It took me a bit of practice to suss out the brake pedal and varying degrees of pressure to switch between engine running/stop/pull-away. I tend to disable the front assist if i'm on a spirited drive with friends, and it's proved more of a liability, and although you do have to turn it off each time you start up the car, it became much quicker to do through the steering wheel menu in the assist settings than through the centre screen. The other thing that threw me recently was when i received the car back from the dealership and the brake pedal didn't seem to function as expected - it would always pull forward unless you had your foot on the brake, and i was about to book it back in with the dealership to look at, when i realised they'd simply disabled the auto-hold. Simply pressing the switch to turn it back on "solved" everything

Has anyone else had any issues with the media unit on their mk7? Everything was working fine or so for the first year, but then my iphone suddenly stopped streaming music, and i put it down to an apple update breaking compatibility or perhaps an issue Eventually i booked it into the dealership to look at whilst having a service, and they concluded it wasn't the MDI cable and wanted to book it back in for a software reset. At the 2nd booking they did the software reset, but this didn't solve the problem and in-fact both the music and iphone charging now no longer worked At the 3rd appointment they replaced the MDI port, the cable, and did another software reset.. to no avail. I then got a USB MDI cable which i plugged my iphone cable in to and this at least charged the phone, even if i had no music. At the 4th appointment they replaced the whole media unit... and this time it came back with no music, no iphone charging and no bluetooth... right before my Le Mans trip The dealership then went back to VW for a few weeks to try and work out WTF to do, and some time later i had the car booked in with them for 2 weeks, during which time they replaced the whole media unit again, did a software reset, again, and then wired in a new shielded loom for the media unit, after which it came back in full working order with music, charging and bluetooth Apparently there's an issue with the cables in the standard loom which became damaged in some way, and the solution is to simply re-pin a new loom of wires in to by-pass the damaged one, leaving it all in-place rather than trying to remove/replace it entirely. All is working now so that's great, but it's been 3 months of annoyance with 5 separate bookings at the dealership. Has anyone else had anything similar to this with their media unit?

I think there's actually more than 1 given the frequency of red golf R's i see in my neck of the woods

Great stuff, thanks for all the effort organising this Hamid

I've run several of my cars not tuned by MRC on their dyno and all the results were consistent with other dyno's they'd run on, so i can vouch for the accuracy. I've also run dyno days there for 15+ cars both tuned at MRC and other places on several occasions and not had anything out of the ordinary.

MRC are not just another generic tuner with some basic IT skills. Minhea has been tuning VAG cars for decades and i'd be willing to put money on not a lot of people having more skill and experience than he does.

I started without a PW and just used a Gilmour foamer on the jetwash, thinking that it'd be powerful enough, but it's absolutely not! You really can't replace a decent foam lance - i personally use the autobrite one which has worked perfectly for years. I think as said the key thing here is that most people will already have the PW out to at least rinse, so that's half the battle already solved, and it's really no extra hassle to foam. Infact it makes the wash lots easier. I do have a friend that tends to foam with megs hyperwash which is pretty thick and then just use a mitt and a wash bucket - no suds bucket!