EVO magazine tests the Audi R8 with the Porsche 911 C4S, Aston Martin V8 Vantage Prodrive and BMW M6.
Needless to say the Audi was the true superstar of the group.
The BMW M6 may not look all that serious in terms of its performance, but its 500 horsepower V10 can deliver thrills that will leave you wanting to run it hard everytime you drive it.
The iconic Porsche 911 this time in capable C4S form has a chassis and balance that has been perfected for over 4 decades and is the benchmark for everyday usable sports cars. Its involvement, precision, steering, agility and precision have made the M6, Aston Martin V8 Vantage and many others pail in comparison. The other cars looks like cows on ice meanwhile the Porsche 911 is a time tested and perfected machine.
The M6 and Porsche 911 C4S may be fast and the Porsche maybe the four decade long benchmark, but there was one new entrant in this group that provided a confidence aspiring, capable, intoxicating and precision filled experience that the BMW M6 could not come close to matching and even the Porsche was left in its wake.
The Audi R8 was given praise that the BMW M6 was far from achieving. Find some of the quotes below:
After just half an hour, it’s obvious the R8 isn’t tracing the usual high-performance-Audi flightpath but is heading into orbit. I’m reminded of the supercars that have hard-wired themselves into my central nervous system and downloaded a rush of sensations that linger and glow like direct sunlight on retina. A decade ago, an insane, twenty-minute blat across the North York Moors in a Porsche 959 left me tense, twitching and close to visceral meltdown. My adrenalin-drenched state had more to do with what I’d managed to get away with than achieve, but the concentrated memory will stay with me forever. I repeated the exercise a few months later in a tweaked Ferrari F40. The experience was so intense, so wild and so sharply administered, it left me with an aching neck and tingling nerve-ends for hours after.
It soon becomes clear that the R8’s baseline abilities are similarly extraordinary: its amazing stability, traction and grip, unparalleled steering accuracy and bite, its uncannily flat and disturbance-free ride. For these attributes alone it blows the reference points thus far provided by the others out of the frame. But the crucial difference between the Audi and the supercar markers we’ve driven down in – what shines through like a halogen beacon –is the sublime effortlessness of it all.
It all feeds into the overriding impression of fabulous dynamic cohesion already established by the exquisite steering feel, enormous grip, brilliantly judged damping and colossal top-end energy. The bottom line is that the R8 can corner at a quite ridiculous lick – all the time feeding back finely resolved information about the road surface to the rim of the wheel. And its transient responses are little short of phenomenal. Up in the hills it scythes through one particularly challenging series of sweeping semi-hairpins into a section of manic S-bends with frankly amazing speed and precision. It’s as extreme and addictive as you could want.
But, in the end, purity of purpose and breadth of ability win the day, and no car here – probably none under £100K – expresses the fusion more perfectly than the R8. There are faster supercars, but we can’t think of another currently in production that takes a demanding road apart with quite the surgical precision and cool-browed composure of Audi’s incandescently rapid and hugely desirable R8.
So here’s the answer. It’s one we sometimes doubted we’d ever witness, but, for the good of the supercar’s evolution, it could hardly be better. Audi humbles Porsche. A new dawn starts today.
The Porsche 911 Turbo maybe faster and even more precise, but even that true global everyday supercar icon and benchmark asks too much of the everyday commuting driver to achieve its amazing abilities. It is scary on the limits of adhesion and it doesn't have nearly the same cool and calm composed ride of the Audi R8.
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