HAVE you ever played that special game, reserved for Sunday afternoons when the weather is awful and the wine is not, in which participants nominate their dream car and explain their choice?
Last time I played my car of choice was Porsche's Cayman S Coupe (in Guards Red, of course), a car I reckoned to be a completely practical sports car that could toddle to work on a daily basis before venting its spleen in a bit of club motorsport on the odd weekend. And at $146,000, I reckoned, it could be affordable (well, not to me but in Dreamland everything is affordable, isn't it?) as well as practical. After spending some serious quality time recently with Audi's TT RS model, though, my undying affection for the Porsche has taken a bit of a battering, simply because the Audi actually serves as a complete rival to its distant cousin in almost every way.
Now the TT itself is not unfamiliar, the sexy little retro-styled coupe having been around for the best part of a decade now.
But the RS rework is not so much a rework of the regular model but a deconstruction and reconstruction using some of the old bits and a truckload of new bits to fit in the vacant spaces. So in comes a new 2.5litre, five-cylinder, turbocharged engine belching a very handy and pulse-quickening 250kW and 450Nm of torque to go with it. (By way of reference, Ford's 5.4litre Boss V8 used in the Falcon XR8 delivers 290kW and 520Nm.)
The engine attaches to a very slick, very tight, close-ratio six-speed manual gearbox and drive goes to all four wheels via Audi's own quattro all-wheel-drive system that essentially apportions power to the axle most in need of it at any given time.
It is a ripper system that goes very close to eliminating wheelspin and dialling-out understeer by giving well-balanced handling, something drivers come to rely on with a car like TT RS.
Other things? Don't look for too much in the way of comfort because, true to Audi RS tradition, the coupe gets things to make it go harder or faster or both and creature comforts don't really come into the equation.
The suspension, example, is tuned to be hard and to make the tyres, big 255/35 things on 19-inch alloys, hang on as tightly as possible.
That it can jiggle your glasses down your hooter on most surfaces other than billiard table-smooth is immaterial. That it can hit its bump stops on pot-holed roads just doesn't compute, and the fact that it constantly needs a driver prepared to work the controls is a foregone conclusion.
If the fixed rear wing, the big wheels, the deep front airdam and the special badges tell the outside world what the car is then the special interior is the giveaway to those lucky enough to get inside and with Audi Australia expecting around 80 to 100 sales a year that will not be too many with its lightweight sports seats (they are almost race seats) and that slightly austere look that shrieks ``no nonsense!'' to the uninitiated.
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