The Action Clutch steel flywheel is fantastic for the MS3 (I have a 2011 gen2), it frees up a lot of the rev hang from the factory flywheel and makes accelerating at lower speeds/light throttle much smoother. Upshifting is quicker and heel-toes are more precise. Nothing but praise for the flywheel!
WHAT I SAY BELOW DISCUSSES ONLY THE LUK CLUTCH KIT, NOT THE ACTION CLUTCH FLYWHEEL! (which is why the review is still 5 stars, because the flywheel itself 100% deserves 5 stars and Damond doesn’t control the LuK clutches. 5 stars for Damond as well for great parts and customer service on MSO.)
The LuK clutch kit on the other hand has me slightly concerned. I was under the impression that the LuK kit was functionally a direct OEM replacement and expected an OEM clutch pedal feel with the same stiff pedal, hard bite, and short (~0.5 inch) engagement window I had grown used to on the factory clutch.
After about 550 miles on the new setup, the pedal feel is still MUCH softer/spongier than the OEM. I did a direct back to back comparison with a friend’s stock gen1 speed3 and my jaw was on the floor when I got back in my car, my clutch felt like a Miata clutch compared to his! The pedal in my car has definitely gotten stiffer and grabbier over the break in period compared to when the LuK was first installed, but it settled to a *somewhat* consistent behavior around 450 miles, which still is outstandingly different to an OEM speed.
I would say the pedal stiffness is about 40-50% lighter than the stock one, the bite point about 0.5 inches higher in the travel, and the engagement/slip zone about twice as long as the factory clutch, and as someone who really enjoyed the behavior of the stock clutch, I’m pretty disappointed that the LuK feels like it does despite being marketed as a direct OEM remanufacture. I bled my entire hydraulic system (brakes and clutch) through with DOT 5.1 fluid less than 100 miles ago and while it improved the brake pedal feel, it didn’t change the clutch feel at all.
The lightness and sponginess of the pedal also makes it difficult to modulate smoothly as my driving style is tailored directly to the old OEM clutch, where it is smoothest to hold the pedal at the same “trigger” spot where it bites hard and modulate throttle gently to slip smoothly. It feels inconsistent with the spot in the “slip zone” that it actually starts engaging the disk and less grabby than even my 130k mile factory clutch, which I replaced because I felt the “grabbiness” sharply decline over the course of 6 or so months.
I am hoping that the pedal feel returns to near-OEM stiffness and that the LuK starts biting down hard like the stock clutch did, as I have seen online that some OEM-style clutches take up to 1000 miles to fully break in, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve been trying to adapt my driving style to the new clutch but it genuinely is very inconsistent and difficult to modulate with how light and how much more travel it has while engaging coming from the bang-on trigger of the stock one. The reason I went with LuK in the first place was because I absolutely loved the OEM clutch pedal feel, and I wanted to keep the pedal feel factory with the lightweight flywheel upgrade.
I should mention that I don’t have any issues with actually shifting the car/functioning of the clutch disk itself when the car is moving. Shifts still register with no slipping, however when shifting quickly/more spiritedly, the gearbox doesn’t ‘snap’ the revs around quite as hard as it used to when the pedal is released quickly, which gives the impression that the clutch isn’t grabbing nearly as hard as the old one, which only started to behave that way in the last month before replacing the clutch/flywheel (and it had 130k miles on it). It held up to WOT pulls in 3rd and 4th gear without slipping and some harder shifting in boost as well (after 500 break in miles), but again didn’t feel like it grabbed very hard at all during those shifts, much different to factory.
At the end of the day, I will have to live with it regardless of whether or not the LuK breaks in further/starts to feel more OEM, but the reason I’m writing this is to say this very definitively somewhere on the internet, as I couldn’t find anything clear when researching about it:
Despite being technically an “OEM equivalent” replacement, the LuK clutch kit for the mazdaspeed3 does not deliver anywhere near the same pedal feel as a stock car. It’s a much softer, sloppier, less grabby pedal than stock which feels much worse in my opinion. At over 500 miles put on the LuK in my car, I’d recommend something that is advertised as a slight stiffness upgrade to OEM if you want a pedal feel similar to OEM. Currently, the LuK in my car feels similar to if not worse than my 130k mile factory clutch that was on its way out.
