NEW! CAR Magazine Announces its Performance COTY Awards '08

I think that BMW has pushed Audi and now Audi may be pushing BMW. This is good for the industry. We want all our great auto manufacturers to push the envelope continually.

Another award for the R8. Audi has really produced an epic car, congrats.

I already have the issue.November issue of Car Middle East.

congrats Audi R8. A really great car.

btw GT3RS was fastest around the track followed by Caterham, R8 and M3.

JUGNU

Sweet - the RS is the sweetest car these days

I found this article very interesting, In the way they were surprised by the R8...and how it was like the NSX. But the thing is the Audi isn't all that different from the NSX in formula, which is an affordable exotic. The NSX is a 15+ year old vehicle. Then i thought the audi isn't that different it didn't really move any bar or create somthing original, its just a modern interpretation of an old formula , i don't see whats so surprising about that. Don't get me wrong the Audi is a nice car but the fact they chose it b/c it surprised them dosnt make to much sense to me.Audi just built something ppl forgot about.

anyway i like that article on the M3 i believe that said it was the car that was the most fun to drive, and that it had a presence in the pits that rivaled the supercars, and the final line in the M3s review was "another amazing achievement from BMW"

there was also another thing i found interesting in the article about the S5 besides it being an atrocious
track car. The journalist wrote about the difference between RS and M cars. It went something like this. im just going off memory. but they said the RS feel special a slow speeds but it never formulates into anything brilliant at higher speeds. Where the M car are the opposite they feel like normal cars around town, but as the speed increases the M cars become brilliant.

thats not word for word but im sure S4 could post it......since he forgot to include that part....wounder why.......

The R8 is getting a lot of journalistic praise . It's new , it's different , it looks cool. If this chart is accurate it did not break 8 minutes at Nurburgring (8.04 seconds). It did not beat the 997S (which costs less and has decades of race heritage). It was only 7 seconds faster than a Cayman S . It did not even beat its sibling --the RS4.

http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?viewThread=y&gID=3&fID=0&tID=10073

The R8 8:04 was driven by Horst von Sauma, the same person who did a 8:06 in the 997 S and 8:09 in the RS4.

The 7:58 the RS4 did was driven by a DTM driver.

And about the racing heritage, Audi has almost a century of racing hertage.

Driver's differ and the R8 certainly has made its presense known . The car has brought a freshness to the segment and that in itself is admirable in my opinion . However -- at no point does that in some way diminish the quality of design and engineering which has made the Porsche 911 a benchmark for decades.