Audi TT RS 2016 Review

Audi TT RS Coupe

International Launch Review

A mega-strong motor, a heart-rending engine note and limpet grip levels dominate the new TT RS’s list of abilities, but it’s not perfect. It still lacks the nuance and finesse of the best in the class, but it’s now a better all-rounder than it’s ever been and you pay a far lower pain price over patchy roads.

At something like $145,000 when it lands in Australia next year, you could argue that the TT RS would need to be good to justify the step up from the $100,000 TT S Coupe.

Or, you could convince yourself as you blast through to 100km/h in 3.7sec, it’s pretty cheap alongside the (only slightly quicker) V10-powered R8 supercar. Then again, it’s a whole lot more money than the circa $70,000 RS 3, though the hatchback uses the last generation of this engine, not the TT RS’s new thumper.

You could also save up a few more pennies and drive the Convertible version of this car, too, because it will probably cost about $5000 more than the Coupe. We didn’t drive that one in Spain because we were on the plain and there was rain.

It’s always been a little tricky to place the TT RS in the general scheme of things, at least in part because nobody else is out there with a five-cylinder turbocharged engine sitting across the engine bay, pumping out supercar acceleration numbers.

That didn’t stop 174 Australians (mostly men, who knew?) from stumping-up for the TT RS between 2010-14 and Audi’s hoping for a slight uptick in that for the new one. The entire segment for sports coupes only logged about 516 cars to the end of August for the year, and most of those were Caymans or TTs.

There has always been one dominantly strong reason to like the TT RS. It’s always had grunt to spare and a howling, evocative engine note send by the gods themselves. The downside is that it’s lacked for fun, nuance and driver engagement alongside foes like Porsche’s Cayman and its reliance on the engine for the majority of its character has left it a bit one dimensional.

So (and this must seem logical in some southern German thought process) Audi has tried to fix those perceptions by giving the all-new TT RS even more engine. Oh, there’s more chassis and suspension and all of that, too, but the real eye-opener is that the engine got even better.

The first generation TT RS’s five pot belted out 250kW. The TT RS Plus huffed out 265kW and the new one scoffs at both of them with 294kW.

If you want to mess around from low engine revs, it’s got the outgoing motor covered, there, too. It thumps out 480Nm, up from 450Nm and the TT RS Plus’s 465Nm, and it does it from just 2.5 litres of engine capacity.

To make that more impressive, you can access every last one of those Isaacs from 1750rpm and they’re all still there at 5850rpm. In case you’re wondering, 5850rpm is the exact part of the rev range where the engine hits its power peak, which it then hangs on to until 7000rpm, so you can stand on the throttle and expect it to give everything it’s got from 1750 revs until, effectively, the rev limiter.

There are cool bits, like direct and indirect fuel injection, like variable valve timing and lift, like a turbo that can stuff in up to 1.35 bar of force feeding, like a hollow-bored crankshaft that’s a kilo lighter. The list goes on. And on…

Not a single bolt is shared with the old five-pot and the car is lighter than the original, too, weighing 1440kg (down 35kg) and it even has the indecency to be slightly more frugal. Only the bore and stroke dimensions are the same. Some things just aren’t fair.

It’s not just lighter, but it’s lighter where it counts. Audi knows all about the difficulties of inducing handling finesse out of nose-heavy coupes, so it pulled 26kg out of the now-alloy engine – including 18kg just by using a magnesium oil pan.

It also takes in all the good stuff of the current-generation TT and adds some more juicy bits, including a hang-on rear-differential that’s capable of swallowing and spitting out 2000Nm of torque – which makes the TT RS’s launch control system one of the most effective and drama-free out there.

Audi would like to tell you how much torque it sends to the rear axle, but the real answer is that they’ve tried to make it rear-biased to offset the 58:42 front-to-rear weight distribution. They can’t actually put a number on just how rear-biased it is because that’s a constantly moving target, depending on how much torque the car can use, and when it can use it.

But, let’s get down to it: Audi didn’t break the part of the TT RS that worked beautifully before. It’s better and stronger and has almost precisely double the torque output of the original Ur quattro.

It starts with absolute intent and menace, just like the engine it replaces, but unlike that one, it borrows the R8’s steering wheel and you start it by pushing a bright red button hanging down off the right-hand spoke. There’s another one on the left side, but it covers the drive select go-stop-ride-handle packages, from Comfort to Race modes.

It turns over with even more menace if you poke the centre console-mounted sports exhaust button, which leads to all manner of torn air, borrowed baritone, fizzing turbocharger and burbling overruns.

Audi insists the car doesn’t use a scrap of synthetic sound enhancements, save from the slight contrivance of fiddling the maps to deliver a “controlled backfire” in the exhaust for the burble, but everybody does that these days. Yet still it compares pretty well with the achingly gorgeous engine note it replaces. Nearly, but not quite as good.

The one area where it falls a bit short of the old motor is that its flat torque and power curves mean the engine doesn’t ever feel very linear about the way it works, and you can smack into the limiter when you think you’re still about 1000rpm short of it, particularly in the middle gears.

That’s mostly a product of the lack of a constantly climbing performance curve, but the sound of the engine also steps up to its sonorous best early in the rev range and almost holds the note, rather than tweaking the timbre and brutality as the revs rise. But that’s one of the few criticisms you could make of the motor.

It’s a rare treat to dial up its easy-to-use launch control, with the traction control off and the sports mode engaged. Just stand on the brake and throttle simultaneously, let the revs build the boost pressure and step off the brake. And then the TT RS is gone, at a rate so fast that you’re pulling second gear almost as the car starts to roll for fear of smashing into the rev limiter.

The TT RS launches with a tiny chirp of front wheel spin – maybe 10 degrees – and then it feels like it shoots enough torque to the rear diff to win every-arm wrestling contest, ever, combined.

The seven-speed dual-clutch transmission (which, like in the R8, is the only unit available) is brilliantly fast and flawless for real-world fast driving, and it makes short work of a quarter-mile sprint, cracking through the shifts without dropping momentum and with a wonderful crack from the exhaust every time.

Make no mistake, the TT RS is a stupidly quick car in a straight line and a Cayman driver is going to be left to wonder mightily about those rapidly diminishing OLED optional tail-lights. Even Audi’s engineers suggest it should be realistically good for a 3.5sec burst to 100km/h in favourable conditions and, when I asked what “favourable conditions” meant, I was told: “not raining”.

It’s not much different out on the open road, where the engine’s big turbo defies logic to respond quickly and easily to the throttle on everything from quick closes to subtle balance-shifting nibbles to the full jandal. Full jandal also delivers charisma overload as your ears ache from constantly trying to grab more and more passing exhaust soundwaves.

The only obvious powertrain shortcoming is that the transmission hunts around a fair bit on the track, even in its sportiest modes, and doesn’t let you short-shift and take advantage of that torque wave. Fling it into manual mode, though, and there’s the problem solved, with paddle shifters that work far more intuitively than the backwards manual-shift gate on the stick. Oddly, the same mode that failed to function well on the track worked mightily out on the winding roads of Spain, never missing the chance to be in the exact gear we needed, every time we needed it.

There might be seven forward cogs in the box, but it’s really a close-ratio six-speeder, with a fuel-sipping highway gear sitting above them all.

The TT RS rides 10mm lower than the stock TT (but, then, so does the TT S), and it’s standard on 19-inch wheels and custom Pirelli P Zero 245/35-series tyres, though Audi’s Australian functionaries are trying to talk Ingolstadt into giving it the optional 20-inch boots (255/30) as the default donuts.

There is an optional suspension setup with magnetic dampers that should, in theory, give it a bigger operational window in more road conditions, but Audi has no idea what that will cost in Australia yet.

The thing is, the TT RS has two major handling issues to overcome against a Cayman before it even starts. Firstly, it’s an MQB car (meaning it’s underpinned by Volkswagen Group’s modular chassis architecture). Sure, it’s the most advanced and sporting of the MQB cars, but it’s still sharing its core architecture with the Golf and the A3, where the Cayman is a purpose-designed mid-engined coupe. Secondly, it’s 1440kg, which is 130kg heavier than the Cayman with a PDK ‘box.

Those two things alone handicap it in the twisting bits, then you throw in a steering system that is accurate and fast, but has all the visceral nuance and delicacy of an Ikea meatball.

There’s nothing wrong with the mid-corner pace it can generate, particularly when you work out that it manages the slow stuff best by waiting early, then nailing the throttle late. It’s also massively adept at high-speed corners and it can also adjust its line mid-corner like a proper car, and it stubbornly refuses to believe it’s ever irreparably exceeded its grip limits.

Likewise, it’s hard to exceed the limits of the front end’s eight-piston brake calipers, though the overstressed skid-control systems lean on them a lot to keep the car from understeering. We got them to sink a bit, but they remained effective and enthusiastic. Still, you could spend more and save another 13.5kg with carbon-ceramic anchors and have none of the pedal drop.

It just seems like it’s doing all this like it’s a paint-by-numbers handling car and that doesn’t leave much room for artistry, even if it’s got more cornering speed than most of its operators will ever surpass. It never just flows and eases its way across the road’s bumps and bends.

The upside is that while the suspension is taut, it’s not uncomfortably taut, and it seems to work better the more energy you put through the springs. Push the car hard and faster and you can expect it to ride better. Hmmm.

In Comfort mode, it’s actually reasonably plush and in concert with the quieter of the exhaust settings, it turns the fire-breathing little coupe into a useful trans-continental cruiser.

That’s helped by a magnificently clean, crisp, sharp interior, dominated by the 12.3-inch Virtual Cockpit multimedia screen-cum-speedo, complete with a new RS graphic and mode to collate and show off your pedalling prowess.

The RS-specific seats are enthusiastically bolstered, but manually operated (for height, not just weight) and tremendously grippy in the most trying of circumstances.

All of this and it’s a coupe that still boasts 305 litres of luggage capacity, and the ability to flop its rear seats down to add another 407 litres.

2016 Audi TT RS pricing and specifications:
Price: $145,000 (estimated)
Engine: 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo-petrol
Output: 294kW/480Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 8.4L/100km (NEDC Combined)
CO2: 187g/km (NEDC Combined0
Safety rating: TBA