“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?
audi 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.
audi 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.
