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My Golf 5 GTI has become a beast. It was making 260kW and in the region of 450 to 460Nm of torque. The mileage on the car was on the higher side and the car was still running on its original clutch. Till now I haven’t had any clutch issues. One Sunday I took the car for a bit of a spirited driving session and I ran into an issue. First to third gear pulls was fine but as soon as I hit fourth gear the revs would run away and you just smell the clutch. I would never forget that smell as it is very unpleasant.
My mind started wondering, what clutch would I have to fit in the golf now. I like the feel of the standard clutch and don’t even want to go the route of button clutch. A button clutch would make the care more of a race car than a day to day streetcar.
I have run a button clutch on a streetcar before and that wasn’t and fun. Sometimes you would get perfect pull aways, and other times it would shake the car and it would feel like the car is going to fall apart.
So what were my options
I thought of just fitting e new standard clutch but as this is a performance car I would just destroy the clutch in a short time. Something that I have become accustomed to doing is when a part fails or wears out on the car I would look for a performance upgrade for the part. This way I know that what I put in would last longer than the standard parts would do.
There are so many clutch kits available out there. It makes it really difficult to make a decision. All the reviews on the kits are good. One thing that I did come across is that when you change the clutch on a Golf 5 GTI you have to change the flywheel as well. The Golf 5 GTI has a dual-mass flywheel. The issue with these flywheels is you can’t skim them. There is a lot of people out there that do skim these flywheels in order to same some money. It is not recommended doing that.
What is the function of a Dual Mass Flywheel?
One of the big factors in modern-day cars is the NVH factor. This is “Noise”, “Vibration” & “Harshness”. To dampen down the engine noises and gearbox gear chatter due to harmonics the flywheels started getting heavier and this started affecting the performance of the engines. The heavier the flywheel the slower the engine would respond to input. You do not gain torque by running a heavier flywheel.
The car manufacturers came up with a cleaver design, where you would have 2 lighter flywheels in one with springs that connect the tow in the rotational direction. This acts as a massive dampener that absorbs the harmonics. The downside of a dual-mass flywheel is over time the springs in the flywheel do work out and eventually, the flywheel can fail. When you up the power of your engine the life of the Flywheel can be reduced. It all depending on your driving style.
Finding a clutch…
I took a look at the website www.vagcafe.com where I have bought a lot of my parts in the past. They had a kit on their site, the name of the kit was a BFI Stage 3 Clutch Kit. When I saw the kit I knew I had to have the kit. I did a bit of research on the kit and everyone was happy with these kits. One thing about the kit was it had a solid flywheel that replaces the dual mass flywheel. This is something that worried me a bit as I did not know-how noisy the car would be.
The thoughts were the older cars had solid flywheels and they were not that noisy. The manufactures must be trying to get the cars super quiet. I found some videos on YouTube with guys that have replaced the dual mass flywheels with solid flywheels. They did walkarounds, around the car and show driving as well. The noise was minimal, I could live with that.
After some thought, I decided to go with a stage 2 BFI clutch kit. The stage 2 and 3 kit was the same in every aspect except for the clutch plate. The Stage 2 clutch had an organic material lining were stage 3 had segmented ceramic pads. I was a bit scared of the day to day drivability of the ceramic clutch disc.
The Install…
I ordered the stage 2 BFI kit and it took a week or two to get here. The quality of the kit was really good and the kit was well packed for shipping. The kit was a bit on the expensive side but for quality like this, I don’t mind paying the price.
As it was a big job to replace the clutch and I didn’t have the space to do it, I took the Golf to one of the performance shops I have used before. The next day the shop phoned me and said the car was ready for collection. I spoke to the guy that did the install and he was very happy in the way the kit went together. Everything was a straight fit with no issues.
First impressions
I got into the Golf and the first thing I noticed was the clutch pedal was extremely hard. I wonder by myself with this the right thing to do. There was a bed-in procedure so for the first 1000km I had to drive the car normally without loading up the clutch. This was purely so that the flywheel and clutch surface is nicely bedded in otherwise you could get the clutch slip and burn the clutch plate.
From a performance standpoint, the clutch was great after the bed-in was done. The clutch did not slip and it made the gearshifts very crisp. There is one downside to the clutch, the noise it makes is unbearable. With standard engine mounts like all the cars had in the videos the clutch kit will work fine. For a car that as upgraded engine mounts the cabin of the car acts like a speaker. All the sounds get transmitted to the cabin. Some people may like the sounds but I hated it. For now, I would drive the car like this and see if I could get used to the new sounds that the car makes.
I must say after two weeks of driving I was used to the tight clutch pedal and it felt like a normal clutch again. I also sort of got used to the sounds the car made. All I know going for a spirited driving session was a lot of fun. I would recommend this clutch kit to anyone that needs to upgrade there clutch. Just keep in mind if you have uprated engine mounts there will be some extra sounds from the engine\gearbox.
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