So it wasn't really the gasket but the head that was toasted? Did it over heat and warp? Haven't heard much of head issues on the VW platforms.
There was a lot going on actually and I'm convinced that all of it was due to a bad repair by the Audi dealer. I'll start with what I know about the car. We bought it with 70k miles. I found the original owner and called her, it had gone through a fuel pump failure and had the entire fuel system replaced under warranty and around 60k miles the serpentine belt came loose and got behind the harmonic balancer and the car jumped time and bent valves. Dealer fixed it and she drove it for a few more months and traded it in.
Soon after we got it I was going through and fixing fuel, coolant and boost leaks so I was always wondering what kind of "fresh out of NADC or equivalent student" had done the repair.
Around 90k miles it got deleted and Malone tuned and it gave me a trouble free 115k miles at 42mpg average.
I think around 150k miles I installed a magnetic drain plug and on the next oil change I pulled out this stuff:
I did some searching and asked a few gurus but nobody had a clue WTH it was from and pretty much everyone agreed that if the car wasnt making any funny noises and was running great and getting good MPG that this was junk left in the oil pan from the old repair and to not worry about it.
On to the head gasket repair many miles later. After removing the valve cover we found that 3 of the rockers lost the roller, causing the cam lobe to ride on the pin that holds the roller(finally got an answer to WTH those half shells and roller bearings were!) Cam lobe actually didn't have much wear surprisingly (probably goes to show how good these synthetic oils are these days!) Maybe having 3 exhaust valves not fully opening caused higher cylinder pressures and caused combustion to leak over into coolant passages? Or just a bad head install from a wanna be mechanic?