Ah, a nice straight and that means it is time to scare myself silly. The RS4 is no hooligan when it comes to drag strip aping acceleration. Truckloads of electronics and power to all corners ensure that rubber does not react violently with tarmac on full thrust. The gearbox is full of positive shifts, and the first gear pays more or less lip service. Second is the one you drive in, and third takes guts to use fully. And you do need to get to an edgy clutch. Going through the ratios is an eye-dilating experience as the RS4 stuns the clock at 4.8 seconds to 100 kph. By the time you realise this and get your eyes back on the straight you are doing 200 kph and not far from the end of the straight. There is a reason why Formula One races are not held at the Dubai Autodrome and that is a pity. It would be nice to see F1 cars make full use of the tarmac here. The RS did too, but I ran out of guts and tapped the amazingly sensitive brakes (another advantage of all-wheel drive) that brought down the speed as if I’d hit a concrete wall. I was not going to fiddle with the switchgear in the short span that I was getting to know the car. Still, the 40:60 torque split could be felt as the RS4 straightened the corner with no apparent effort.
Forget the near nuclear surge and complex powertrain for a second and the RS4 transforms to a wonderful driver’s car with no match. Few months back, I had driven a couple of ‘normal’ A4s in and around Ingolstadt and I realised they were mere Diwali rockets compared to the ballistic missile that I was now strapped into. All right, I am yet to drive one in anger through a hailstorm or for that matter in snow but I don’t think anything short of a twister or a debutant lunatic driver on steroids will be able to unsettle the dynamics of this machine. Or it needs DTM drivers to cause some sideways action – in fact, Audi had helpfully brought them down to do just that. When you drive a rear wheel drive car fast, you are always aware of the approaching limit – of the car as well as of your ability to catch it when it snaps – but the RS4 lets you concentrate on the road (or in my case, the track) and on thinking up ways to shorten the time taken to devour corners. I did talk to veteran Euro journalist friends who have lived through generations of Mitsubishi EVOs on how they would compare the Japanese supercar killer with the RS4. The answer was clear – you can compare it to a production Skyline GT-R but not to something powered by a stir-fried four-pot. ‘For God’s sake, this one is a propah f***** V8’, said another. Happy now, I went for refreshments. My time with the RS4 was over and I was determined to drive it on a proper driving road. Maybe through the extremely well paved yet twisty Jebel Hafeet just off Dubai city.
Wait a minute – I have not dealt with the looks of the car at all. I know you are already ogling at the pics in these pages but I can assure you that the Audi RS4 looks even more stunning in the metal. In fact, we’ve used images from Audi’s media database rather than from the drive, because stickering was hiding some of its lines in Dubai. I am not a big fan ofthe chrome surround for the greenhouse (not in this car, please). And I thought the twin slashes on the front bumper belonged to an after-market mod than a fully-blown company effort. Still, the car looks stunning when it comes around a fast, unsettling corner – then it looks like a DTM racer replica. Which, it can justly claim to be.
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