I purchased this car from my sister (after my parents GAVE her their old Subaru – think they had a favorite child?). She had let a ton of things slide so my first few months of ownership were spent just restoring it to OEM-ish functionality. The car was very bare bones, I believe the only option was an automatic transmission. It came with the 3-spoke steering wheel so I guess that means it had the “sport” package. It wasn’t very sporty.
In fact, it was rather cushy, soft, and rolly polly – although this tends to be the way with most stock Audis. They try to thread the line between outright Mercedes-Benz luxury and BMW’s sportiness, and in my opinion sort of lose their way and become very middle of the road, blah, German Camry-ish.
The absolute first thing I did for this car was go out and get a bad ass RS6 style rear lip spoiler from eBay. This added some much needed “flair” to the car. I then proceeded to lower it on Eibach “sport” springs with Bilstein shocks. The lowering was marginal, and the handling improvement was also marginal. It still rolled but it seemed to hang on before letting go.
Next I went with an EVOMS intake, a reflashed APR ECU, and a Borla cat-back exhaust. I know VW fanboys will claim that the 1.8t can “nevar lose” but in all seriousness, it took the car from dog ass slow to not quite as dog ass slow. I’d say it was about as fast as the 1998 2.8L 30v V6 A4 Quattro which my father owned – which is to say it would do 90 without breaking a sweat but wasn’t going to beat a Civic with a motor swap.
Bored to tears with this car I traded it for a 944 Turbo – a far more entertaining vehicle. I probably should have kept it . . .
autophiliac 