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Kraftwagen König
"You," said my best mate Jonny in the pub a few months ago, poking me in the chest with a demonstrative index, "will never stop, will you?"
"What?" I shouted, while Kylie tinnily exhorted me to 'do the locomotion' from a speaker just above my right ear. "What do you mean?"
"You will never settle down with one car. There's always something newer and shinier or more gadgety or with fuel-injection that uses depleted plutonium spark plugs. You're essentially unfaithful to any type of car. You're a motor-whore."
"Er?" I said, displaying the sarcastic wit for which I am famous, "I suppose so, yes."
The point of this inelegant ramble is that the resultant conversation exhausted itself at that familiar petrolhead terminus: pick one car for the rest of your life. You have 10 seconds, and you can't have an impractical exotic and hang the consequences, because children, wives and dogs are legally not allowed to be carried in a strap-on top-box. So?
My first thought was a Range Rover - practical, timeless, elegant and relatively understated. But it's a bit slow on its feet. My second thought was the RS6 Avant Plus.
Ah, I thought, score one for me. Now there's a car with a rounded portfolio of talents: understated, practical, timeless and capable of making your kidneys high-five your liver with the force of its considerable performance. And there's a new one soon, so it's bound to be even more techno-delicious than even the V8 twin-turbo that came before it. That, my son, will be my dream car - the one for always.
Fast-forward a few weeks and I'm achingly close to driving it... and 'excited' barely covers it. Audi has granted journalists just a couple of hours with the car and I'm itching to fire it up and give myself a self-induced motoring epiphany.
Parked outside the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France, the new RS6 bristles with more advanced technology than most DARPA military projects, clothed in the sober stylings of the civilian gent. A monster wearing an innocent skin.
Indeed, pretty much everything about the new Audi RS6 is mouth-permanently-slightly-open mental, except for the way it looks. The headline is the engine: that V8 has bred a little and is now a V10 with a pair of turbos that produces a simply earth-moving 571bhp - in an Avant bodyshell.
Yup, until the saloon comes later this year, the RS6 is only available as an estate with several gravities of torque, four-wheel drive and a 'Tiptronic' paddle-shifted six-speed auto that's nearly as fast as a DSG ('S-Tronic') dual clutch gearbox.
Seriously, even if you're not turned on by torque curves, this one has to be seen to be believed - the peak torque figure of 480lb ft is produced ridiculously early at 1,500rpm and tries to brain you with the headrests until the orangey sunset of the rev-range somewhere north of 6,000rpm.
What that translates to are on-paper statistics that belittle pretty much anything currently in production - including those impractical exotics you may have considered for your rest-of-life car. Try 0-62mph in 4.6 seconds. A limited 155mph, or you can specify a slightly higher electronic hand on the shoulder at 175mph if you feel the need.
Derestricted and given its co-efficient of drag, gearing and horsepower, you're looking at 200mph plus, 1,660-litres of terrified-labrador-accommodating load space. Its inherent ability to suck tarmac out from under the horizon is, it has to be said, pretty special.
But like all RS products, it looks relatively anonymous. There are the traditional mortar-sized oval pipes slung out on the edges of the rear bumper, silver mirrors, square wheelarches that pay homage to the Ur-quattro and the obligatory 20-inch wheels, but this is definitively not a showy car, especially in darker colours.
In fact, it could be a massaged 'S-Line' derivative, which is brilliant for S-Line A6 owners who appear to have deeper pockets than they actually do. Not so great if you've shelled out the £77,625 to have the full RS6 work-over.
There are other hints of course: the front bumper gets a pair of gaping air-inlets that hint at the nuclear heart and you don't get brakes that size on cooking models (more noticeable if you go for the more showy ceramic performance brakes option), but the RS6 hasn't sprouted a cancerous forest of plastic, or given way to too much pimpage.
About the only real glitz are the LED running lights, but you can get those on boggo new A4s, so nobody's going to get overly excited.
Inside it feels special, but it's hard to be sure why. You can point at objective stuff like the lovely bucket seats, the flat-bottomed 'RS' trademark wheel, the obsessively clinical dash arrangement that looks just so perfect - but it's not the kind of car that is equipped with an interior that tries to define the experience.
The RS6 has a serious face on, and it'll probably get offended if you crack a smile because, unlike camp super car interiors that look amazing but melt when they reach four years of age, the RS6 seems ready to stick with you for the duration of your driving career. It's not exuberant, but it is committed.
Saying that, there's a glorious engineered weight to the whole car even at a standstill that'll put a respectful grin on your face. You may have heard rumours about geological build quality, but here it is red in tooth and claw. It's almost as if the RS6 is actually built in manufacturing HD. Just a little bit more real than other cars.
Firing the V10 up is almost a little religious rite. Foot on the brake, press the red-lit starter button (you don't have to - the car starts on the key as well - but it's fun once in a while) and there's a starter-motor whine followed by a familiar bassy thump of an RS6 yawning into life.
Weirdly, even given the two extra cylinders and noise-muffling forced induction, this still sounds like an RS at low speeds, even if it isn't quite the purple-chocolaty-velvet sound of the old V8. That's a good thing.
Familiarity soon gives way though. There is a precise moment at which new RS6 rams home its second-generation point and it's at around 3,500rpm in second gear. And third. And then fourth. The noise is peculiarly revvy-sounding up to a baritone crescendo, at which moment it gets dispersed by a torrent of induction noise like a waterfall having a tantrum under the bonnet.
Weirdly, it sounds better from outside, and less weirdly, twice as good with the optional sports exhaust.
It also tricks you into thinking the RS6 will rev much higher than it actually will. Whereas the old car had that familiar V8 thrumble that you expected to have to restart with another gear around 6,500rpm, the new version has a peculiar wail that sounds like it'll go much higher.
I kept hanging the car on the limiter (no auto up-change thank God) because it sounded like it was going to rev like a BMW. You get used to it, and it's certainly no slower for it, but it is strange.
Still, after that, you will undoubtedly realise that the new engine and four wheel drive system demonstrates its effectiveness at going really, really fast in two indelibly memorable ways. First, in the potential bankruptcy of the fine, and secondly the length of both the ban and the prison sentence. This is not a slow car. Or perhaps France is not quite a big enough country, whichever.
Each gearchange, when selected from either the two stumpy and horribly plastic paddles (the only real interior complaint) mounted on the steering wheel, or the gearstick itself, is heralded by the same stuttery pop as a DSG gearbox hard-throttle upchange.
The fact that the shift time is down to just 100-milliseconds is a testament to the obsessions of Audi's engineers, because this gearbox still has a torque converter. That means when you don't want to humiliate Porsches, the RS6 can slush between ratios like an A8 or S-Class. The duality is eyebrow-raisingly incredible and as close as anyone has come to a true auto that has a defined sporty edge, rather than a sequential manual that can also self-change.
But again to the practicalities. Steer into a corner and there's mass. And you can also instantly tell this is a four-wheel drive even though there's a 40/60 front/rear torque split on the new quattro - this time for better response. It seems to carry lots of weight low, and the whole experience is very video-gamey.
The steering itself is really rather nice, but you can literally sling this car into a corner with the kind of gay abandon usually reserved for unimaginative suicides and not worry. The four-wheel drive and electronic aids (though I suspect they aren't really needed in a car with this much natural grip - I certainly didn't feel them acting very much) tidy you up and spit you out on any road-based corner with just a whiff of understeer.
Really, if you're a crap driver, you need an RS6. It'll make you look better than you are, like those special mirrors in clothes shops that make you look thinner. It flatters to deceive.
Charging about, you develop a sense of unreality and terrible megalomania. It rides brilliantly, isn't deflected by bumps or ridges, doesn't get loose or untidy unless you actually try to crash it into something.
The Dynamic Ride Control (DRC) is back and, as Audi has proved with its smaller cars, there's much to be said for the abilities of four-ringed suspension these days. And because the car is so beautifully composed, there is also no overtaking manoeuvre the RS6 cannot manage.
Twitch your foot, engage those turbos and prepare for thrust like you've just engaged a pair of 747 jet engines welded to the roof rails. Hit the limiter. Do it again. Arrive at a corner too fast and too ragged and sling the big car in anyway, only to be relieved to find that not only did you get around the corner unscathed, but there was only a touch of tyre squeal and a lot of surprised onlookers to show for it.
After a few hours, it is empirically impossible not to come to the conclusion that this, without a shadow of a doubt, is a genuinely awesome car. A car to be respected and revered. A pinnacle of speed plus poise plus horsepower divided by driver talent. There's only one real problem, and believe me I've worn my brain down into a sore and fractured nub trying to work this one out.
It's really boring.
It's hard not to be seduced by the sheer speed, don't get me wrong, but I've never become so blasé so quickly about this much horsepower before. Even with such monumental outputs, there is no 'edge' to the RS6 - at least one that's accessible to mortals.
Play with the suspension settings all you like. Switch off the traction control, fling it around like a mentally damaged collie and the RS6 will always manage and mitigate its power rather than revel in it. It is a machine that you respect with every ounce of your being, but you don't feel sorry that you might never own one.
There is no sense of loss when getting out, no sense of being emotionally attached to the car. In some ways it's the perfect Audi, but not the perfect Audi RS.
What makes it worse is that Audi isn't boring. The RS4 is magic. The R8 a revelation. But the RS6 is a demonstration of engineering skill, of manufacturing excellence, rather than of passion. And a car this berserk needs to be able to connect to your soul to really switch it on.
So, in answer to the original question posed in a bar all those weeks ago, what would I have if I could only have one car for the rest of my life? Sadly, I'm going with my first answer: a Range Rover. And I'll just learn to drive more slowly.
Tom Ford
Lovely Ree
