It’s been less than ten minutes since I got behind the wheel of the scarlet Audi you see on these pages. Moments ago, we were taking pictures of the car in and around a small, rain drenched village somewhere near Ingolstadt, Germany. I reprogrammed the navigation system and headed out to the designated lunch spot. Sure, I have driven in left-hand drive territories before, but on this occasion I managed to terrorise myself.
A sharp left into an autobahn approach, a kinky clover leaf and a fast-moving truck in the slow lane usually mean trouble. The truck-driver couldn’t have seen me as I eased gently into the merge-into-autobahn-without-causing-trouble zone. Then a glance at the rear-view mirror and I saw disaster written in bold. A quick click of the gear lever to second and the A4 throttle was floored in the nick of time. A short prayer in my mother tongue ensued. The 1.8 Turbo that I was driving got the message instantly and sent all the 22.5 kgm of torque available to all four wheels.
It certainly was one of the quickest acceleration runs I have done in real life conditions and I squeezed into the slow lane before the Audi 1.8T and I got immortalised in an armco barrier. The rear view mirrors had MAN written all over them, but I had enough gap to shift to third and move into the second lane. The faint whistle of the turbo could be heard and there was no drop in revs as another jab brought the Audi into fourth gear and into the empty fast lane. I could see the massive truck in the corner of my eye now and as the Audi climbed to 200 kph it became a distant speck. If there were speed cameras in this part of the world, Audi certainly would have got a speeding ticket sent to them. I am sure they wouldn’t mind, since no speeding ticket could have equalled the value of a brand new A4 1.8T quattro.
The best part of the whole exercise was that Yogi, as in Yogendra Pratap, executive editor of Overdrive and my passenger at that point of time, didn’t even know what I was doing. No, he didn’t even notice the drop of sweat that gently rolled down my forehead. Brilliant.
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