R8 Ignition Coil Grounding

Hello everyone, quick question on what is the best / cleanest way to ground ignition coils. With the R8 VAG coils having 2 grounds per coil and it being a 6 cylinder, there's 12 grounds total. I would just run them all together but it's a lot of wires and kind of bulky. Curious to know if anyone has done or if it is safe to splice them all into a single 16awg m22759/32 wire (matching the coil power feed) and grounding through one wire to the head. Any input is appreciated thank you!

Hey Charles,

It's perfectly fine to splice all the coil grounds into a single 16 AWG ground wire.

I'd generally follow the same wiring principle as the 12V supply side. For example, if you're running a single 16 AWG feed that branches out to individual 20 AWG supplies for each coil, you can do the same thing on the ground side.

Keep in mind that one of the grounds on the R8 coils is a power ground while the other is a signal ground, so neither typically needs a particularly large conductor. To keep things simple, I'd just run both as 20 AWG from each coil and splice them into the main ground.

The important thing is that the total current flowing through the main ground conductor is well within its capacity. Since only one coil is typically charging or firing at a time (unless you're running a batch fire setup), a single 16 AWG ground is more than capable of handling the load.

The main thing I'd focus on is keeping the ground point clean and ensuring all the coils share the same ground reference.

Yes that's exactly how I have it for the 12V supply, 16 AWG to individual 20 AWG so I will match that on the ground side. Thank you for clearing that up for me. On a side note with these coils I have always ran both grounds as power grounds to the cylinder head as suggested by Link ECU, MaxxECU, and a few others and never have ran into any issues. Would it be safe to run both grounds per coil (signal ground and power ground) on a single 20 AWG and go to the head like normal? Almost like branching a 16AWG ground to 6 20 AWG grounds (one per coil) and at the coil connector, crimp an additional 20 AWG or 22 AWG onto pin 4 (main power ground) and loop that second wire into pin 2 (secondary ground / signal ground). Hope that makes sense lol. Just trying to see what would be the cleanest way to ground them while being safe.