XYZ Racing Tarmac Rally Coilovers — Audi S1 SPORTBACK 8X (Cancellation Kit for Electronic Damping) 2014-2018

The 8X S1 is a strange and brilliant thing – a 231bhp turbo four driving all four wheels through a chassis that’s essentially a Polo underneath, with the rally DNA Audi never quite let it shake off. The factory magnetic ride was tuned to keep the press happy on a B-road launch, not to survive a Welsh stage in February. This Tarmac Rally kit replaces it wholesale, and the cancellation harness in the box is what makes that swap legal in the eyes of the car’s ECU.

For a Quattro-equipped supermini with a kerb weight that punches above its size and a short wheelbase that loads its front axle hard on turn-in, the gain from a properly-valved coilover over the original adaptive struts is significant. This is the suspension you fit when you’ve stopped pretending the S1 is a hot hatch and started treating it as the homologation rally car it always wanted to be.

What this coilover does for your 2014-2018 Audi S1 Sportback

Compliance is the headline. Tarmac Rally valving is built to soak up the broken edges, manhole covers and mid-corner ruts of sealed-stage events without the suspension going into bind, so the front tyres stay loaded when the road tries to unload them. On a road car that translates into a S1 that no longer skips sideways over expansion joints and stops pattering on coarse-surface motorways. Damper control lets you hold the nose down under trail braking – the one thing the standard car genuinely struggles with, given its short wheelbase and front-biased weight transfer. Ride height is corner-balanced rather than spring-perched, so you can lower the centre of gravity without losing usable shock travel, which is exactly the trap most off-the-shelf lowering kits fall into on this chassis. Steering response sharpens because the front axle is no longer fighting hydraulic delay from the cancelled magnetic ride circuit.

About the Tarmac Rally coilover

Tarmac Rally is XYZ’s sealed-stage specification, valved from the company’s own rally programme rather than scaled down from a circuit damper. The brief is impact absorption: surviving big single hits – kerbs, drainage cuts, jumps off rural crests – while still controlling body movement through long fast corners. The damping curve is built to suppress shock through the bodyshell so the contact patch stays planted and traction is preserved through the loaded wheel, which is the entire point of a Quattro-platform rally car. All baseline settings are carried over from XYZ’s tarmac rally race experience, so the kit lands on the car with a usable, drivable map out of the box rather than a generic stiff-on-everything tune. Included with this part number is the cancellation harness required to disable the S1’s electronic damping module – without it the ECU throws a fault and the dash lights up. Plug it in, the car is none the wiser, and the new coilovers do the job the magnetic ride was always limited at.

Fitment for the Audi S1 Sportback 8X (2014-2018)

Chassis code AU43-C, covering the 2014 through 2018 production run of the Sportback five-door S1. This specific part number includes the cancellation kit for the factory electronic damping system, which is required to retrofit conventional coilovers to any S1 originally fitted with magnetic ride.

What buyers also search for

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• 2014-2018 Audi S1 ride height and damping adjustment for short-wheelbase chassis

Configure your spring rates and ride height options below.