Post Break-Drive
I posted the other day I crossed 600 miles. This past weekend I took the car to my favorite twisty roads and gave it a proper drive for about 4 hours. I put about 120 miles on the car door to door on that drive. Below are my thoughts. For reference, I am a previous VW fan boy who had a mk7 GTI, mk7.5 golf R, and mk8 Golf 8 spanning 12ish years.
I was absolutely blown away by this car. I thought I knew what this car was capable of but I really had no idea. I couldn't come anywhere close to the limits of this car on public roads. The roads I drive on are a mixture of tight twisty roads with 30-35mph speed limits connected by a long, scenic (freshly paved) semi windy state highway with a 55mph limit.
Every time I turned onto the state highway I floored it and went to redline in 2nd. I may or may not have tried red line in 3rd a few times but I didn't want to go to jail so I kept it to 2nd on my full throttle pulls. The sound in sport+ was on a different plan compared to my golf r which was mostly synthetic. The cracks and burbles made me giggle every time. I think the actual acceleration was pretty similar to my mk8 golf r since it was awd and dsg...but from the ol' butt dyno the ITS just felt faster from all-out assault on my senses.
I cannot begin to describe how good it feels to be back in a manual, and this manual is easily the best I've owned. The auto rev match was such a delight on the twisty roads. I know some may frown upon it, but I am willing to admit I'm not great at heel-toe. In my last manual which was the mk7.5 golf r, I would often just stay in one gear on twisty roads so I didn't have to downshift mid corner...with the ITS and the seemingly perfect rev matching, I was shifting 2nd through 4th constantly. It was almost begging me to downshift every time I had to do a dab of breaks.
I could feel the difference in the fwd here and the awd in my golf r on heavy acceleration. There were a couple times, if I hit the throttle too hard in 2nd at the sweet spot and hit full boost, my tires would skip a bit. I also felt the torque steer every so slightly under full throttle in 2nd but it didn't actually steer the car, it felt more like gentle lane correction than anything. That was probably the best part about the golf r, you could thrash that thing and it would just go. No drama, maybe the back would kick out a bit but the power was always available.
TLDR: OMG I love this car. What an absolute joy to drive. I enjoyed driving this car around town but it truly shines on twisty roads. Any doubt I had changing from VWs to the ITS is completely gone. I cannot wait to get back out there and drive it again.