Audi RS4 Avant 2013 Review - International

It hasn’t taken long for Audi's equivalent of M or AMG, quattro GMbH, to get its claws and engines into the facelifted A4, but it hasn’t always been that way. Just look at the very limited editions of the RS3 and the RS6 for clues, because Audi has used its go-fast division to perk up ageing warriors. Not anymore. With AMG and M finding more and more ways to be relevant, Audi has decided quattro needs to follow suit.

Essentially, the RS4 is the RS5’s engine and crown-wheel centre diff stuffed into a wagon bodyshell with extra stiffness, tauter suspension, bigger tyres and a more hard-core interior design.

Sounds like a recipe for success to us…

There are two ways to look at this, though, because for only €14,000 more than a TTRS Plus Roadster, you get a roof, three more seats and a proper luggage area. Oh, and three more cylinders and a double-clutch gearbox as standard fit.

But on the downside, it carries a lot of options for something that’s a flagship at the top of the A4 range. For starters, it rides on standard 19-inch rubber, but almost all of them will be sold with the more expensive, forged 20-inch wheels with Pirelli PZero 265/30s.

Then there’s the small matter of the brakes. The stock anchors are fine for anybody, as we will explain later. Even if you do track days, all you need to do is fit them with semi-competition pads and save yourself the $10,000 or so the carbon-ceramic rotors, with their tougher calipers, will cost. Audi will tell you it’s about the weight saving as much as the stopping power, but not many RS4 owners will be able to pick the 4.5kg, even if it is all unsprung mass.

One important added cost is for the top-end Audi Drive Select system. Its standard fare includes the ability to switch the car from Comfort to Sport and to Sport Plus, but the optional system allows you to set up your own Individual step as well. That’s right handy for when you want all the Dynamic performance on a bumpy road.

There’s more… Audi also provides Dynamic Steering as another option, with its ability to vary the standard, linear 16.3:1 steering gear ratio by almost 100 per cent. It even helps with tossing in some opposite lock if things go very pear-shaped, but given that this is an Audi chassis, how likely is it that the back end will step out anyway? Skip it, because the car feels nicer without it.

There is plenty of everything else in it, though, because it’s basically a top-of-the-range A4 wagon… A choice of three different seats (up front, anyway), six different trim inlays (and that’s counting wood as just wood, not Audi’s huge variety of woods), MMI navigation or Navigation Plus and so many other options Audi could write a book about it. In fact, it did.

That means a 4.2-litre, all-alloy V8 with direct fuel-injection, variable valve timing and lift and a huge torque spread. The best -- all 430Nm of it -- arrives at 4000 and sticks around until 6000.

Though down on the monster AMG mill in the C63, 430Nm is reasonable -- especially in something this size. The key point is that it’s exactly the same torque figure as the old RS4, but it arrives 1500rpm earlier. But that’s not the whole truth of it. This car is 1795kg, with 90 per cent fuel load, but the old RS4 (the B7) was 80kg lighter. Audi Ultra be damned.

Other than that, the engine revs out to 8500rpm, delivers its 331kW of power at 8250 and hauls to 100km/h in 4.7 seconds. Lest you consider this tardy, it streaks past 200km/h in 11.4 seconds on its way to a limited 250km/h top speed. In Germany, they’ll lift that to 280 for you, but it’s still limited.

The dual-clutch s tronic gearbox hooks all of this into a crown-wheel centre differential and, should you think it worthwhile, you can spend more to put a sports diff between the rear axle. Should have put that up in Prices and Equipment, but it’s here now. So there.

The anchors continue Audi’s wave-pattern 365mm front steel brake rotors, which Audi claims saves heaps of weight but really just looks cool.

Whatever weight they save is offset entirely by an eight-piston front caliper that looks suspiciously like something off a Lamborghini.

Underpinning it all, the front and rear suspensions have both been heavily revised, courtesy of the A4 facelift.

It gets one of the largest luggage areas in this style of car, tremendously comfortable front seats, a beautifully designed and easy to use dash area and rear seats that are surprisingly adult-friendly.

The highlights start from the boot opening, which is high, wide and handsome, and progress all the way past doors that also open to big angles to the nose that looks a lot lower than it is.

COMPETITORS
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For Audi, it’s an old, familiar enemy: AMG. The Benz hotshop has its C63 AMG in wagon form.

It is also a demonstrable powerhouse, with more torque than the RS4 offers, but only rear-wheel drive and it only comes with the increasingly clunky seven-speed transmission that is, essentially, a Benz automatic with a robotized manual clutch pack stuck on one end of it.

BMW hasn’t even arrived with the M3 version of the new 3-Series, so it’s not a contender. Jaguar isn’t a wagon company, the French don’t exist in V8 form and that leaves the Americans. There is a Cadillac that sort of goes close, but it’s not sold in Australia.

The electronic safety net slides beneath you and it’s a bit of a metaphor for the car. There is a lot of gadgetry on offer and a lot of it is optional. Some of it is good, some of it isn’t worth the ink you’re not using to read this.

Let’s take the ones that aren’t worth it. There are the carbon-ceramic brakes, for one. The steel brakes work fabulously well in every condition we tried, and that included a racetrack. The pedal stays high and proud and – and this is especially unusual for an Audi – firm even under the most demanding pressure.

More importantly, they stop the car well, time after time and are easy to modulate. The carbon ceramics do all that, too, but they cost more. A lot more.

Then there’s the steering. Standard’s just fine, thanks, because the flash optional setup can feel odd and is definitely less natural in its movements and responses. The stock setup offers enough feedback (more would be better, though the optional system doesn’t provide that, either), enough precision and is access via a beautifully trimmed, flat-bottomed leather steering wheel.

The one you will need is the top-level of the Audi Drive Select. That’s because the Comfort mode is too squishy for having a solid punt on the winding road and mates its suspension responses with a pre-set lot of steering, throttle, gearbox, stability control and makes them all like-minded.

With the top version of it, you can have the softer Comfort suspension (and steering) with the Dynamic version of the engine, gearbox and stability control. And this works nicely and you can leave it programed to return to at will.

With this setup, you’ll find the RS4’s chassis to be trustworthy and reliable and a bundle of fun. The harder it’s pushed, the better it reacts and the more entertainment it provides. It has balance that defies the engine’s location; grip that defies its Avant bodystyle; and just enough awesome to justify the wheelarch bulges.

The only key issue is that, while it normally runs 60 per cent of the drive to the back axle (and can surge 85 per cent down there or 70 per cent to the front diff), it never seems to get it there fast enough and you always know it was based on a front-wheel-drive system.

Dynamic mode won’t fix that, either, because it does much the same thing as Comfort, bundling everything together. It’s trouble is that it’s just stupidly hard and clearly geared up for those who need obvious points shoved down their throats.

I’d normally go with “Americans” here, but the RS4 isn’t bound for them, so I’m not sure who they were thinking of.

What they weren’t thinking of was handling. The RS4, in Dynamic mode, is basically undriveable on a public road. There, said it. Someone had to.

Any bump sees the car struggle to get its power down, sees the chassis try to keep going whatever direction it was trending towards before the bump arrived or sees the driver increasingly lose confidence in his ride’s ability to keep it together, so much so that you’d be quicker in Comfort mode anyway.

The shame of that would be that you’d miss the best of the snap, crackle and pop from the engine.

It is a beautiful device, at once menacing and threatening and it’s really two distinctly different engines in one. Below 6000 revs, it’s a monstrously torquey motor, happy to be short shifted and cruised around in tall gears. It sounds meaty and brutal and deep, too. And it pumps along nicely.

Above 6000 revs, though, it’s an entirely different animal, bristling with smoothness and singing a high-pitched wail all the way to the limiter at 8500. It’s almost like the weight is lifted from its endeavours and it spins just for fun, where in the torque zone it’s spinning to get a job done.

The transmission is fabulous, too. It’s good enough that nobody will much miss the departure of the manual version.

It’s all a wonderfully secure package for people to use, guilt free, as family or business transport, with more than enough giggles for the solo operator to enjoy when the car is empty.

Just be careful with the boxes you tick to get it into your driveway.

More photos of the Audi RS4 Avant at www.motoring.com.au

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