Where to even begin with the
Audi R8 V8.
Let's start with the
Ferrari
458 Italia, a car that doubles the base price of the
Audi. It's much more fun to drive than
it is to talk about; discussions among enthusiasts usually begin with someone
saying, "It's amazing!" and end with everyone else agreeing. Opposite
that is the vast, swirling nebula of cars that are often more fun to talk about
than they are to drive.
In between, there are very few cars that are as fun to discuss as they are to
drive, and this Audi is one. It's a car that challenges our notions about its
actual competitive set and, even better, its philosophical competitive set, its
driving experience, its price, its future, its present viewed from the future,
and its verifiable and/or potential pedigree.
We recently attempted to sort out some of those notions during ten days in an
R8 V8 driving from Munich to Le Mans. We arrived at quite a few answers, and
although we walked away from it still confounded, there's no denying one thing:
it is so, so good.
Audi's R8 is an impressive and deeply alluring car, as
opposed to beautiful.
We took possession of a white R8 with black sideblades at
the Munich airport, then headed straight to meet a local friend and to
photograph it before introducing all that Ibis paint to German bugs at 180
miles per hour. Taking a long look at it while it sat posed in front of the Nymphenburgschloss and Antikensammlungen,
your author thinks it's an impressive and deeply alluring car, as opposed to
beautiful – not a Venus, rather one of the finer works of that ferocious hot
smithy, Vulcan. With an overall aesthetic that, like its performance, is
sublimely balanced. In fact, only one note strikes as odd, and only when you
stop to notice it: there's ample front overhang.
But its compact shape is all business, low and wide, nary a superfluous curve,
and once you turn it on, its LED daytime running lamps transform that already
fierce face into an ice-cold threat. If The Wolf ever saw fit to get rid of his
Acura NSX, this would make an
excellent replacement. And let us go on the record as saying it's criminal that
Washington won't let us have the facelifted R8's sequential turn signals.
If it weren't for the endless stares and your knuckles
scraping the pavement when you adjust the seat, you could be excused for
thinking you're in a slammed RS5.
As we would discover over a few days tooling around
Bavaria's heart while loading up on Würst, Radler and idyll, the R8 is the
perfect urban pet. For a car that looks so low you could scrape your knee on
the roof – it's two inches lower than a
Porsche 911, the same height as
an
Aston Martin
V8 Vantage – it's easy to get in and out of. The diktat of exterior
purpose continues inside, with exactly zero fuss inside the cabin, only a lot
of leather, aluminum and quilting. The coupe is seven inches shorter than an
Audi A5and almost half an inch
shorter than an
A3 sedan,
so you can always find a parking spot. The drama is entirely outside the car;
sitting inside, it takes a foot full of throttle to even hear it. It's such an
obsequious daily driver that if it weren't for the endless stares and your
knuckles scraping the pavement when you adjust the seat, you could be excused
for thinking you're in a slammed
RS5.
Except for the way it looks, the R8 exhibits almost no urging – which is part
of its conundrum and why we've always been conflicted about it. If it's not
beautiful, it is definitely magnetic, but we wonder what we'll think of it in
ten years. It looks like a supercar and it makes us want supercar thrills, but
its performance fits firmly into the sports car segment. It starts at $115,900,
about $10,000 more than a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, about $15,000 less than Aston
Martin's
new
entry-level V8 Vantage GT. It's not as classically beautiful as either of
them, but it's four times as striking and un-ordinary as the other two – and
yes, we are aware of how much gall it takes to even hint that any
Aston Martin is ordinary.
It has 430 horsepower and 317 pound-feet of torque, meaning a little more hp
and a little less torque than those other two cars. Its 0-60 miles per hour is
4.3 seconds, equaling the
Porsche,
just a few tenths ahead of the Englishman.
When not being pushed it behaves like the Platonic form of A
Daily Driver.
A supercar on the outside, sports car in genus and when not
being pushed it behaves like... please don't take this the wrong way... the
Platonic form of A Daily Driver. That should be a good thing, right? So why
can't we help missing the thrill? What's more, it's not as convenient as those
competitors, for lack of a back seat area to assist that tiny trunk. On top of
that, unlike every other sports car in its segment, the R8 has a dearth of
pedigree – which is astonishing considering how much racing and winning Audi
has done. So maybe that's perceived pedigree?
This philosophical goulash, and its Audi badge, might be why we hardly see them
anywhere. Over three days in Munich we saw two R8s, one less than the number of
C5
Corvette coupes
- not all Corvettes, just C5 Corvettes – and equal to the number of
Ford Mustang models. This
isn't about money, either – the Münchner are a wealthy lot, jamming the roads
with Porsches; it was easy to ring up three or four 911 Turbos an hour. In LA,
we see more Ferrari 458s than R8s, even though
Ferrari has sold just 171 cars
in total in the US this year compared to 422 R8s.
That's another astonishing truth, because the R8 is so, so, so damn good. When
we finished in Munich we had to get to Waibstadt for a wedding, and that meant
a run over 300 kilometers of Autobahn.
The R8 fastens itself to a derestricted stretch of empty
highway in a manner that goes beyond confidence, into certainty.
The mid-mounted V8 is a sweet piece of business, the OED
definition of drivability and composure, and the package around it is spooky
good at Autobahn speeds. Goad the needle on toward 190 mph and the R8 fastens
itself to a derestricted stretch of empty highway in a manner that goes beyond
confidence, into certainty. It welcomes fearlessness – not foolishness, mind
you – on roads you've never seen before and at speeds you've only dreamed.
We stayed in Heidelberg, meaning we had to make the round trip to and from
Waibstadt every day. The bride and groom had their true love, we had our
42-kilometer commute morning and evening, and we still wouldn't trade one for
the other. Once off the highway, rural Germania is cut up by plentiful and
sinuous tarmac ribbons begging for summertime blasts between burgs. The R8
isn't as light on its feet as some other highly focused machinery and it's no
stranger to understeer if you go looking for it, the counterweight to Quattro
being the solid sensations it imparts and its superlative balance on the
Autobahn and just such B-roads.
One (more) thing we like about exotic sports cars is the lack of driver
assistance systems; they don't want to do much beyond try to keep you from
killing yourself, so the R8 is, in the main, nanny-free.
It's so easy to access what the R8 can do (and it can do so
much), but it's still missing a few specific bullet points of "Wow."
When finally called to make the 722-km trip to Le Mans, we
left Waibstadt on a supernaturally beautiful weekday morning, and whatever
German word is the opposite of Autobahn in a nasty traffic jam around
Saarbrucken. Legendary for unlimited speeds, the vehicular constipation on
German highways can be just as extraordinary. At this point it was back to R8
as... please don't take this the wrong way... a regular Audi. Like the
aforementioned Porsche and Aston Martin, you could live in it all day, but the
aging Audi cabin arguably isn't as special the other two, certainly not the
Aston Martin.
Not long after being set free from the mess around Saarbrucken we hit the
French border, where maximum speed limits encouraged the use of cruise control
and a return to the R8's Clark Kent mode. We tried to figure out what this car
is during this last leg into Le Mans – it's clinical in many ways, yet it's
impossible not to notice. Even so, once you close your eyes, there's almost
nothing visceral about it. It performs beyond its price, and it's got the
interesting dichotomy of being short on space yet otherwise easily livable on a
daily basis. We occasionally wished the new S-Tronic transmission had reflexes
that were quicker still, but thankfully its steering is gorgeous. It's so easy
to access what the R8 can do (and it can do so much), but it's still missing a
few specific bullet points of "Wow." Perhaps that's what the V10
model is for.
Taken in total, it is a conundrum that from now on we will always enjoy
revisiting and pondering anew from behind its flat-bottomed steering wheel. No
matter what else we might want from it, what we definitely get is a coupe that
is so, so good.
Image Credit: Copyright 2014 Jonathon Ramsey / AOL
source: Autoblog
by Jonathon Ramsey
http://www.boscheuropean.com
