Our exhausts have earned praise from owners and the press alike, due to their unique "Jekyll and Hyde" personality. We spend considerable time and effort during development to achieve remarkable civility when idling and cruising at part throttle, while also producing a war-cry wail when full throttle is applied. Sophisticated, refined, and powerful, all at once.
We spent considerable time examining how to maximize the performance and options of this exhaust system. The factory exhaust consists of a long downpipe with two catalytic converters, and two rather large mufflers in the section after the cats.
Thorough long-term street testing has confirmed that our high flow downpipe, equipped with the 200 cell metal catalytic converter (for both FSI and TSI), will not set a Check Engine light or any fault codes in the ECU. For FSI customers looking for ultimate power, our HJS German-made metal catalytic converter will provide an additional 9hp over our ceramic converter option.
Here are some features of our system. Each feature was chosen for performance and longevity reasons, and when making your exhaust decisions you should settle for nothing less:
- Fully mandrel bent tubing
- Thick .065" wall T304 stainless steel tubing
- Fully lined stainless steel flex joint in downpipe
- Stainless steel internal muffler and resonator construction
- Stainless steel MIG and TIG welds
- Stainless steel T-bolt clamps
- Double walled exhaust tips to reduce heat discoloration
- Included OEM turbo to downpipe gasket
- In house dyno developed
The downpipe features an integrated resonator to keep the exhaust sound volume civilized even with the elimination of the very restrictive factory converters. Our downpipe is the first performance downpipe to be released that will not trigger a Check Engine Light on TSI 2.0T cars, even on factory software.
The catback system is topped off with our signature 3.15" beveled exhaust tips. The tips sport stamped AWE Tuning logos and are double walled to ensure a mirror polish even under hard usage. The system has multiple slip joints with high-quality stainless band clamps, to allow optimal adjustment.
Our catback systems will mate up to the stock downpipe, and our downpipe will mate to our catback or any other catback that is designed to mate up to the factory downpipe.
Why did we choose 2.5 inch and not 3.0 inch diameter for our MK5 exhaust? Our first prototypes of this system were indeed 3.0 inch, but we found that the effort it took to move the large mass of air in the 3.0 inch system at lower rpms resulted in a loss of torque with very little offsetting gain up top. Take a look at our 3.0 inch prototype dyno sheets here and see why a 3.0 inch system is not appropriate for this car.
