More work done to the car yesterday.
Mostly, it was maintenance - fresh oil, new RS3s, a fluid change for the gearbox and diff, and corner-weighting the car. But I also threw in the Whiteline rear diff inserts and the positive shift bushing, which so far has been a huge mistake.
Not sure who else is running this combination (Simmons? Bill? George?), but I'm really irritated at all the noise and clunks created by these. I expected some noise, but not nearly as much as I got. The "shift feel" wasn't substantially improved, and definitely not enough to warrant all the noise and clunks.
The weirdest thing is that Sam put the same bushings in his car, and his car isn't anywhere near as annoying as mine is. The ONLY difference between our cars is that I have a muffler delete and he has a Perrin exhaust. Thinking that because the front pipe bolts to the trans mount, and I likely have more resonance in my exhaust in comparison to Sam, I put a little 1/4" rubber spacer where the trans mount bolts to the exhaust to try to dampen some of the resonance. This didn't help, so it's back to square one.
Has anyone else experienced this? I can't believe how much noise there is - there is enough that it has made the car very un-fun to drive around town. I was hoping that these bushings would help curb some of the wheelhop I was getting at the NJ Pro, but at this point, I'm not sure it's worth the awful drivability penalty. I'm probably going to pull the shifter bushing at the least, as soon as I have the time to.