Well, we promised Anton Savage we’d get him a test drive in a supercar and this weekend, we came through. The Audi Centre in Ballsbridge loaned us the Audi R8 V10. Here’s some stats:

• 10 Cylinders.
  
• 0-60mph in 4 seconds.
  
• 520 horsepower.

Anton's review:

You go get into the R8 and realise it’s an Audi. This will not come as a shock given the badge on the boot-lid and the big sign in Ballsbridge saying ‘AudiCentre’, but you might expect something in the interior to indicate you’ve just climbed into a car that can happily live with Lamborghini Diablos and outrun Ferrari 360’s. It’s standard (crisp) Audi switchgear, heated electric seats, air conditioning and you get an unencumbered view out of all the windows. Other your buttocks being lower than the curb you were standing on, there’s nothing to tell you this is a weapon.

Until you start it. The Lamborghini-derived V10 jumps to a clattery high-idle, a bit like the box-of-bolts noise you get from the dry clutch on a Ducati 916. After two minutes it warms its little innards up and settles into an off-beat burble that you hardly notice.

The manual gearshift protrudes from a billet aluminium shift-gate (shades of Ferrari’s manuals) and is made from a solid stubby chunk of expensive metal, burnished on the sides to make it feel like you’re gripping a round metal file. Dip the light clutch, snick first and drive off like you’re in any standard commuter car.

Below four thousand RPM the motor has buckets of torque, pulls cleanly and reliably, but never feels like it’s going to scare you. For that, you need the top end of the rev band. That’s where the fear lives.

The best way to experience that fear is to stop, dip the clutch again, floor the throttle so the V10 screams and stutters against the rev-limiter, and then side-step the clutch. There’s a bang as 520 horsepower hits all four wheels. The engine instantly dumps three thousand rpm as the tyres grip (they just will not light up, so for a second you thing you’ve stalled it). Then, just as fast as it lost the revs, it puts them back on, wailing toward the red-line with the front wheels digging in to help the rears launch the car forward. The shift to second clacks through the metal gate, and the V10 again throws on revs as fast as you can grab gears. It makes you re-calibrate everything about driving road-cars; you have to think faster, look further down the track, and be ready for a gear sooner than you ever thought possible. The only comparable experience is winding the throttle on a Hyperbike like a Blackbird or a Hyabusa; it’s that ‘entering hyperspace / world going melty’ feeling that only epic, monumental acceleration can create.

One of the nice features about the car, in the context of all this g-force, is the little shelf behind the seats. Audi claim it’s there to store bags. Actually it’s a place for passengers to crawl in panic. When you slow down, you reach back onto the shelf where they’ve wedged themselves, pull their finger-nails out of the back window, uncurl them from their foetal position and place them gently back in their seat. Half of them will be giggling maniacally. The other half will have that total catatonic calm that comes from witnessing a war crime, or losing several body parts in an industrial machine.

To calm them, just put the Audi in sixth (using it like an overdrive) and everything goes silent in the cabin. Turn on LyricFM and make soothing noises until they recover. Meanwhile, you can spend a few minutes trying to figure out if you can get a V10 engine into bed and if so how the logistics would work afterwards.

Once quiet has returned to the passenger seat, you can introduce your guest to a new level of panic. Sideways panic. First you need to play with a few switches. The first is the active damper switch. Audi have created a very clever little system which uses a magnetic field to change the viscosity of the fluid in the shocks (‘oooohh’ I hear you say). The upshot of it is the ride changes from firm-but-nice to ironing-board. Then you need to disable the traction control. This is something the R8 doesn’t really want you to do. When you hit ‘off’ it announces you’ve chosen sport mode and remains ‘on’ just slightly less aggressive. Achieving ‘off’ requires holding the button down for 3 seconds until it calls it totally quits and provides a dash full of warning lights to tell you that you’ve done something terribly foolish.

With the traction control disabled, the R8’s handling is in a league with few competitors. Its initial stance in corners is understeer, but a boot full of throttle converts that into huge oversteer, thanks to the Quattro system sending up to 90% of the engine’s torque to the rear wheels. That system, which provides so much grip at launch and in the wet, causes an odd handling characteristic in the dry. In a rear-wheel drive car of similar power you’d normally set the car sideways, keep the wheel relatively still and adjust the angle of the car by breathing on and off the throttle. In the Audi, it feels like the centre diff transfers extra power to the front wheels in a drift. When you breathe off, the car starts to snap back into line and no amount of throttle will hold the tail out when it starts to come back because (I assume) so much work is being done up front that it just drags itself straight again. When you’ve learned it, you just drive it like an Impreza; once the drift starts, you keep the throttle planted and steer through the slide. With 520 bhp hitting the road, this means a lot of lock has to go on very fast and it reveals one of the Audi’s few weaknesses; slow steering.

Slow is relative, but catching the R8 when it’s drifting means steering like it’s a forklift; palm of the hand on the wheel and several turns lock-to-lock. A quicker rack would allow you to catch it without taking your hands off the wheel and make the whole experience more confidence-inspiring. As would more feedback from the steering. It lightens up when grip disappears from the front tyres, but it’s dead and wooden compared to the rest of the chassis. The steering-wheel tells you little about the road surface and the grip levels until you get right to the edge of understeer.

The brakes suffer from a similar weakness. They’re hyper-effective, standing the R8 on its nose and hauling it to a standstill in a heartbeat, but the pedal gives no sense of what’s happening at the tyres. There’s way too much servo assistance, so you have to teach yourself to barely touch the pedal in traffic, or learn to enjoy the sound of a petrified passenger bouncing off the windscreen. The over-servoeing means that it’s difficult to heel-and-toe, because it’s tricky to keep steady pressure on such sensitive brakes while you blip the throttle.  

While we’re complaining; the change from its original left-hand drive layout to right hand drive has not been kind to the R8. The accelerator pedal has been offset to the left to fit around the wheel arch, so your busy right leg is at an ankle-twisting angle all the time and the corresponding position of your right knee puts it against the massive Audi key every time you go for brake and throttle. Also, if you rest your palm on the base of the centre console while changing gear, you switch on the hazard lights and traction control. And the ashtray falls out when you open it, bringing its wires with it like a 12 volt umbilical cord.

Frankly, though, once you drive the car, you could care less if the key drove itself through your thigh and the ashtray exploded.

The 5.2 V10 is an epic, fabulous, magnificent thing. It pulls strongly to 6000 then rips your arms off all the way to 8,400. It sits behind your head under a glass cover which reveals the cam-cover to the hordes of men that gather around the car. Women, when asked say ‘ooh, it’s pretty’ but don’t tend to pay it much attention when underway. Men gather around every time you stop. Some even follow you home. It’s a bit like driving around in Beyonce; you’re always conscious that a lot of guys are showing up and a little worried that one of them will touch it inappropriately.

The Audi manual gearbox is the perfect partner for the visible Lambo engine. Changes are firm, but loaded with feeling; your left hand can sense the synchros meshing distinct from the gear engaging. It’s positive, crisp and makes a gorgeous ‘ce-clack’ through the open gate. No-one should buy the paddle-shift. I’m sure it’s a terribly competent box, but it would remove a huge part of the joy of driving this car.

Twenty years ago, young boys’ bedrooms had posters of Lamborghini’s Countach. It was the pinnacle of supercars. And it had side-windows like letter-boxes, a clutch that weighed eight tonnes, a poxy driving position, no rear visibility and it overheated twenty seconds after you fired it up. Audi have created an understated gem that starts first time, behaves in traffic, is comfy and pleasant to be in, doesn’t make you look like a footballer or a lottery-winner and yet will blow the Countach into the weeds.

In fact, the Audi will come very close to whipping a Murcielago and on a wet surface will leave a Ferrari 430 wondering where it went. If you don’t mess with the traction control it will deliver astonishing performance without requiring much driver skill. It doesn’t snap from understeer to oversteer; changes are fast but predictable and progressive. It doesn’t fishtail in the wet or under heavy throttle. The traction control happily sorts any power-oversteer before it begins (if you let it), and even if you leave it in the less aggressive ‘sport mode’ it never builds enough inertia to swap ends; as soon as you lift, the tail snaps back in (albeit with enough ferocity to bounce your passenger off the side window), compared to other cars in this class that’s a remarkable thing (several 500+ supercars try to kill you with power oversteer and when you panic-lift, kill you instead with lift-off oversteer). Not the Audi. It is as close to perfection as supercars have so far come. And when they build a special edition with rear-wheel drive, I will rob my local bank.

To quote Ferris Bueller, “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up”.        

Big thanks to the AudiCentre in Ballsbridge for the loan of Beyonce.