Pre-Race
Lighten your car as much as possible
Removing the rear seats is VERY easy in a mk4 vehicle. All it takes is flipping the seats up, and squeezing the cushion hinges together and pulling the cushion out. To remove the backrests, unlatch the rest and look to the bottom outside corner. There will be a latch over a dowel. Use a screw driver to push this latch towards the back of the car, and lift this side of the backrest up and out. Pull the rest away from the middle of the car and it should slide right out. These combined are over 80lbs. Good enough for almost a tenth.
Removing the front seat is another 65lbs but keep in mind you will also throw and AirBag code (at least in a 2002 vehicle) so you may want to think twice if you don't have access to a VAG-Com to clear the codes. To remove passenger seat, remove the phillips head screws that hold the plastic shrouding around the front bottom of the seat. Also remove the plastic covers on the rear of the rails. This is accomplished by removing the discs that cover the screws and unscrewing them. Simple enough. Now in the front of the seat there are 2 10mm nuts. Remove these and lift the handle you would normally use to slide the seat back. Simply slide the seat all the way back out of the rails. Not too far though, because there are wires/plugs attatched to the bottom of the seat. Unplug the 2 yellow plugs, and use a screwdriver to depress the tab holding the white plastic flange in place. Voila! Your passenger seat is now able to be removed from the car.
Remove the spare. If you need me to tell you how to do this... you shouldn't be driving a car at all. This is another 35-40lbs. When its all said and done, you just removed close to 150lbs from your mk4 pig.
There are other items you can remove, but overall they don't weigh very much. You can expect to get another 5lbs or so by taking out the side panels and rear moldings etc.
Prepare your car
Run as much gas as you can out of your car. I ran until 430 miles on my tank and went to the gas station on the way to the track and put $1.50 of premium in (roughly 1 gallon). This goes hand in hand with the weight reduction. One gallon of gasoline weighs 6.18lbs. Multiply this by the 13 empty gallons in your tank, and you can see you're saving over 80lbs by going on an empty tank. Just make sure you have a gas pump at your track to put another dollar or two in before you leave to be sure you'll make it to a gas station that doesn't charge $2.50 a gallon. On a side note, I have tried everything from 87octane to 100octane gas and found that the best results have been from a 50/50 mix of 94 and 100 octane. 100 octane didn't show any performance declinations, but I got worse gas mileage than I did with 94. I ended up getting 32mpg average with a half tank of 94 and half tank of 100. This is about 1-1.5 more mpg than I get with straight 94.
Make sure to wash your car before going to the track. Now, I don't mean you need to detail it, but at least rinse it off and make sure your windows are clean. This will only help you with visibility... plus it drops a couple ounces of dirt! (Just kidding about the ounces) Having clean windows also makes the shoe polish numbers they put on your car go on and come off a lot easier. Rain-X + shoe polish isn't a good combination either.
At The Track
In the lanes
When you are sitting in the staging lanes, pop your hood to try and cool off the motor as much as possible. Let all the hot air out that you can as this will only hinder your performance. If you're serious enough, you may even consider putting a bag of ice on your intake manifold and in the case of a turbo car, spraying a water/methonal mixture on your intercooler. Methonal evaporates at a low temp and the phase change will lower the temps of the air around the intercooler significantly.
Check your air pressures. You want 40psi in the rear tires and 20psi in the front. (This is assuming you are running normal street tires) You want the back high because they are not being driven, and the harder they are, the less rolling resistance you will get.
Sit back and relax. Shoot the shit with everyone else. Have a good time. DO NO GET NERVOUS. Its only racing. Everyone learns sometime. Everyone screws up once in a while. Your #1 enemy is your nerves... not the sprayed dual turbo LS1 next to you.
Pulling out to the track
There is a big misconception that doing a burnout is neccessary. It only is if you're running drag radials or slicks. If you are running normal street tires its not only useless, but it also wastes tire. (duh?) In conjunction with this, drive AROUND the water. If you are not going to do a burnout, why get your tires wet?
Make sure your ASR is off. This is a killer here folks. Double check to make sure it is disabled.
Staging the car
If your opponent is doing a burn out, pull up to just before the staging beams and wait for them. Staging immediatly puts the pressure on them to hurry up. Its all in good fun, so let them take their time.
Pull slowly forward until the pre-stage light is illuminated. I usually just let the clutch out slowly without touching the gas and keep your foot over the brake. This keeps you from rocketing past the beams.
SLOWLY inch forward until the INSTANT the stage beam is lit. Once it is lit, do NOT pull any further forward. The further back you are, the lower your ET's will be and the higher your MPH will be due to the increased roll out. If you don't know what roll out is, thats OK. Most professional drag racers don't understand it either. Think of it this way. The staging beams will start the times at the same spot no matter where you start. So the further back you begin your movement, the more of a 'running start' you're going to get. You may not think that 6" extra is a lot... but if you can get moving say, .5 mph in those 6", then thats at LEAST another half a mile per hour added onto your speed at the end of the track. Your ET will also be lower due to you already having momentum. Keep in mind this is just a crash course.
Launching the car
As soon as you get stopped, begin to feather the trottle between 2200 and 2800rpm to keep your turbo spooled and ready to go.
When the second amber bulb is on, begin to let the clutch up slowly. Mash the throttle down at this time too. DO NOT DROP THE CLUTCH. I repeat DO NOT DROP THE CLUTCH. This will lead to violently spinning tires and most likely wheel hop as well. Not a good scenario.
When you get to about the christmas tree, your should be about half way up with the clutch, at this point, its pretty safe to drop the clutch the rest of the way. You will experience mild wheel spin, but this is ok.
The rest of the run
When you get to about 6200rpm, clutch in, shift to second, drop clutch. Notice I said nothing about letting of the gas. If you do it quick enough, you will keep your turbo spooled, and not lose that split second of turbo-lag.
Repeat the process at the top of 2nd gear.
DO NOT SHIFT INTO 4th GEAR! 3rd gear is good till about 103mph. If you are chipped, you won't hit rev limiter, and if you are not chipped, you won't be trapping this high anyways, so its unimportant. Shifting into 4th gear will cause you to lose momentum and drop your trap speed.
As soon as you go through the traps, immediatly put the car into 5th gear and coast for a little while. Begin to brake slowly and at the end of the shut down area, check for your opponent. The last thing you want to do is cut off the person in the other lane and cause an accident.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
If all goes according to plan, and the air is decent, your bone stock, off the showroom floor AWP GTi should run a mid 14 second run. Congratulations... you just smoked a Mustang GT.