Audi R8 2007 Review

Enter the bullring

The cliches used to verbalise the sound of a well-tuned engine are stacked up in car magazine offices like old newspapers. Does the new Audi R8 shriek like a banshee or wail like a buzz-saw? Does it growl, roar, blaht, pulse, or just gurgle a bit? Perhaps a Yank car mag nailed it recently when its reporter said the Audi RS4 (running a similar, directinjection, 309kW, 4.2-litre V8 to the R8) reminded him of "an angry, drunken bear being shot out of a canon."

Hey, in the States you see ballistic forest mammals, like, all the time.

We won't squander your attention with excessively flowery descriptions. It's sufficient to say that the new Audi R8 sounds like an angry, drunken bear fighting off a pack of rabid tomcats with a Sunbeam Mixmaster set on medium puree. Got it?

Good, because Audi worried from day one (back in September 2003, when work started on the production R8 directly following the debut of the Audi Le Mans concept at the Frankfurt motor show) that its new mid-engine, all-wheel-drive, all-aluminium Porsche 911-eater wouldn't have an appropriately memorable voice. Ask any Ferrari owner their reason for the big spend and "That sound!" is sure to rank right behind shag appeal. With the R8's pedal mashed flat, the V8 wound up to near its 8250rpm fuel cut-off, the muffler bypass flaps slammed open, and the tiny holes in the twin plastic intake tracts contributing just the right soupçon of induction hiss, this Audi sounds positively fabulous.

Stimulation of this quality doesn't come cheap. The R8 is expected to be priced around $260,000 when it arrives in Australia in September. It'll be rare, too -- of the 5000 cars Audi can build annually, 60 will land here.

A peek under the alloy shell and a turn of the R8's flat-bottomed wheel, as we had in Las Vegas during the chill of January, shows the R8 to be one of the most technically sophisticated cars allowed on public roads. The temptation is to dismiss the R8 as a Lamborghini Gallardo with an Audi eight-potter and skin graft. But you'd be as wrong as the R8's optional pearlescent purple paint -- available in Europe on special order. Though the hand- and robot-welded aluminium spaceframes of the R8 and Gallardo come from the same 250-man workshop in Neckarsulm, Germany, the two cars share only strands of DNA, not the whole helix.

"At first we thought we could take a lot from Gallardo," says Jens Steingraber, head of Audi Sport Project, the department responsible for R8, TT, and a sub-A3 model due in 2010. But Audi, with almost one million units sold worldwide in '06 and a desire to move the brand up the luxury and price scale, wanted the R8 to be larger, quieter, more comfy and easier to get in and out of. "So it was ordered from the [Audi] board to construct it differently from the Gallardo," admits Steingraber.

In short, Audi wanted an executive express capable of daily driving -- one reason the weight crept up to 1565kg, a good 100kg over the steel-body Carrera 4S (but with a laudable 44-56 percent weight distribution, something the tail-heavier 911 can't claim). The Audi is certainly bigger than its Lambo cousin -- by 90mm at the wheelbase and 131mm between the bumper caps -- and it feels it, too. An R8 fills up a lane, even on the SUV-sized roads of the US. With so much acreage between the axles, the R8's footwells are wider and have less wheel intrusion than most exotics, and the snug-fitting buckets travel rearward enough for pro-basketballers. Even at max-aft, they still leave clearance for a set of golf clubs on a broad parcel shelf. Another 100 litres of cargo volume lives under the front bonnet.

The seats feel high, relative to the forwardsloping dash, and the sight lines forward and over the shoulders are almost as clean as a Camry's. The climate control dials and sat-nav screen are handsome parts-bin kit from the TT, set in a dash adorned with carbonfibre accents (optional) and French-stitched leather and Alcantara. If you choose the manual six-speed gearbox (modified from the Gallardo) over the 'R tronic' button-shifted manual -- Audi's version of e-gear -- the shifter pokes out of a Lambo-style aluminium gate.

Down 73kW on the V10 Gallardo, the R8's dry-sump, 4.2-litre V8 makes its hay with a less immediate punch, accompanied by a more muted exhaust note. Audi says 100km/h whips up in 4.6 seconds. Relaxing at 130km/h, the R8 is as quiet as an A8, with just a distant hum from the engine and a faint rumble from the tyres, even over the coarse tar-and-stones stuff that southern Nevada shares with Australia. The hydraulically-boosted steering is a highwater mark for Audi, light and fast with a communication not present in the company's sedans, thanks to their complex multi-ball-joint front suspensions.

The R8's all-aluminium suspenders, in contrast, look racetrack-simple: upper-andlower A-arms in front and an upper A-arm in back, braced by two conjoined lower links (which look a lot like a single A-arm) and a toe-control link. The simplicity is deceiving, especially once you factor in the ‘magnetic ride' suspension. It uses dampers filled with magnetorheological fluid that changes viscosity in the presence of magnetic fields. The suspension re-adjusts thousands of times per second to soften bumps and stiffen for corners and flat-out runs, giving the R8 something more liveable than a racetrack ride. The hub carriers are aluminium, as are the hubs of the standard steel brake rotors (380mm carbon ceramic discs will be an option, probably priced about the same as the $13,200 units available for the Audi RS4.

Corners are sucked in with flat, neutral handling and buttoned-down body control. Where a 911 is heaving and porpoising on its significantly shorter wheelbase, the R8 runs smoothly with buffered suspension strokes. Only serious on-off throttle stupidity will provoke the rear end to step out, and the car's near-transparent stability control will slip it back in line again. You can turn that down to a lower setting for more sideways action, or shut it right off, but the R8 feels so naturally glued that you may never need it.

The R8 skims the road with a flat bottom, punctuated by a few NACA ducts for cooling, while a small lip spoiler cocks upward from the tail around 100km/h to fight the battle against lift. Down a remote Nevada valley, where a trio of airborne US Army A-10 Warthogs served as wingmen, the R8 -- drag coefficient listed as 0.34 -- ran straight and twitch-free, even as its teardrop-shaped speedo approached 280km/h.

In this price neighbourhood the 911's reign has been long, but Audi is rousing some serious rabble with the R8. The time may come when we order you out of your Porsches to embrace the R8, but we'll need to rack up a whole lot more kays in the car beyond our brief, policeheavy, speed-limiting Las Vegas fling.

We will say this, however: the Audi R8 is a tech-infested, mid-engine supercar you can commute in. It's lithe, refined, far more liveable than the wailing buzz-saws from Italy, and, for a time anyway, more exclusive than the common-as-cats Porsche 911. That's got to be a tipping factor for many.