It’s lighter, faster, more powerful due to blah blah blah technical stuff blah blah stiffer springs blah blah polycarbonate rear window etc. It also costs 193 000 Great British Pounds. Which is quite a bit for an Audi, if we’re honest.

But just look at it.

Dear God.

Gallery after the jump >

Audi R8 V10, Subaru WRX Sport, 2am, Hels Hoogte Pass, Stellenbosch.

These days, the people’s car company makes a car for every person on earth. Volkswagen is now a very big family, having gobbled up Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Seat, Skoda and even Bugatti.

"Rohrling" an Audi in a parking lot nowhere near Bedfordview.

Where I’m from “Röhrl” means fight. One might “rawl” in a parking lot or near a lake for instance, occasionally risking one’s life in the process.  Luckily Walter Rohrl wasn’t born in Benoni where he would have been expected to fight inside a cage at Carnival City to live up to his name. He did, however, risk his life in various other ways inside a roll cage for many years.

There’s a few reasons Walter Röhrl’s still alive.  His immense ability behind the wheel being one of the main ones. The fact that he started out as a driver for the Bishops Of Regelensburg  must have scored him a few championship points with God as well, enabling him to stay unusually alive during the Group B era where he drove the audacious Audi Quattro S1.  He famously said to a journo friend of ours that in the S1,” if you had to think, it was too late”.

He was also voted the best rally driver of all time in Italy which further confirms the Vatican’s involvement in his career.  They like their German World Champions fast, and they didn’t come much quicker than Walter Rohrl, who to this day can be found as an official test driver for Porsche around the Nordschliefe.

God. Yesterday.

Röhrl. Parking lot. Etc.

More G-force, vicar?  Witness the spectacle of Walter Röhrl:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVHj3sHVHQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOzuBOefL8I

Robert Downey  Jr reprises his role as Tony Stark, an eccentric billionaire with an incredible blah blah blah. Explosions, Scarlett Johanson, the jaw-dropping Audi R8 Spyder and a race car being cut in half by a bearded guy with lightning for fingers. We can’t wait.

The R8. To get it sideways, you have to park it like this.

It’s very easy to be cynical about the Audi R8. It has the very same engine as the RS4. It has the same sun-visors as the TT, as well as the same air-con switch gear. And when you’re handed the key there is nothing, not even a little R8 moniker, to distinguish it from, you guessed it, the TT’s keys.

This is all forgotten however when you simply stop for a moment and look at the car. It is quite extraordinary. Modern in every way yet with just the right amount of curves to make sure it retains that absolutely necessary supercar trait: sex appeal. And the R8 has that by the bucketload.

The truth is, you could look like the undercarriage of Al Pacino and still get laid in this car. The effect on people is that awesome and that consistent. No matter where I took this car I received marriage proposals, death threats (only half-jokingly), hearty congratulations, flashing lights and rhythmic hooter songs. In a car like this you become somebody. I don’t quite know who that somebody is, but you definitely cannot avoid being noticed. Not bad for a hunkered-down RS4.

In that sense it is completely unlike any other supercar. A Porsche is about as good as cars get, but how much do you really want to talk to the guy that climbs out of one? And don’t even get me started on Ferraris. They are magnificent to own, of course magnificent to drive, and undoubtedly magnificent to look at (except for the 599). But they are almost always driven by magnificent cocks.

In the R8 your reception is so markedly different that it catches you off guard. People want to talk to you. They want to know about the car; how it goes, how it feels, what the speedo reads at the top (350km/h) and how much it costs.

But that’s the R8’s extrovert side. What is much more interesting and much more satisfying for your R1.5million is its introvert side. The inside of an R8 is a very special place to spend some time.

Sitting in what might just be the world’s most perfectly comfortable car seat and running your fingers over the rim of the steering wheel is a very otherworldly experience. I don’t mean to sound over-awed here but there is an intangible special feeling about this car, something that I imagine was hard to create when you’re also trying to sell volume cars like the A3 and the A4. I’ve sat inside Ferraris and Porsches and almost always felt disappointed, where as in here, I felt like I was floating on my back in a river of 12 year old Glenmorangie.

The interior is just so right. The R22 000 Bang & Olufsen sound system is magical in its powers. I was convinced at one point that the spirit of John Bonham had possessed the dashboard and Robert Plant was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, belting out classics at the peak of his vocal powers.

And then you spot a gap in the traffic and put your foot down. The engine howls. The car squats and leaps forward. Quattro ensures there is no slip whatsoever as the redline approaches and you snatch another gear. 2nd gear brings up 110km/h and 3rd gear 140. This is fast, but it’s never scary.

The R8’s 309kW are blighted by its weight. This is a solid, heavy car, downplayed and blunted by infighting at VW HQ. Audi planned to use the V10 in here, Lamborghini reportedly said no. After all, what’s the point of buying the Gallardo at twice the price if the R8 can pull off all of its tricks? Good news though, the Gallardo has been scrapped and is going bigger, possibly to V12 level, and the R8 is getting the V10 it so desperately deserves and needs. As well as a 4.2 litre twin-turbo V8 diesel in 2010. Yip, the V12 has been scrapped.

The R8 remains, first and foremost, a supercar, and I’ll take no arguments there. There are many reasons for this, chief of which is the gearchange. Once you have sampled the manual gearbox in this car it’s difficult to argue for anything else. Manically precise, all of it created from solid blocks of steel and tweaked and tuned for what must have been 10 000 Germanic man hours, this is the most astonishing setup of any car I’ve ever driven. Slamming home another gear becomes an addiction, a symphony of metal-on-metal as the engine dips and breathes for a millisecond before singing and screaming all the way back up the rev range.

Driving this car is an event. In many ways, it’s like a comfy, elegant space trip to another world. A world where power is controllable and at your command, a world where mechanics and the sounds thereof become part of your inner space, part of your thought processes until you’re lost to this world; a distant being in a far away place.

All it takes is another car full of 23 year old men, with camera cellphones in hand and hooters hooting to bring you back, and remind you that you’re driving an event. It’s sort of understandable; there are only 30 of these things in the whole country. Still, driving the R8 in the crazed and hyped-up status that currently surrounds it is like resurrecting Pavarotti and staging a street concert.

For many reasons, I can’t be cynical about the R8, as much as I’d like to. Yes, it is a shameless halo car at the top of an ever-improving line up, from a car manufacturer that makes no bones about the fact that it is chasing BMW for first place in the exclusive-segment. Indeed, this should have been the car that BMW built.

And you know what, I just don’t care. Audi has given 7 year olds the world over a new poster car. They’ve taken the goal-posts that defined everyday supercars and strapped them to the space shuttle. Who knows how long it will take for Mercedes and BMW to work out where they land. That said, it seems Nissan may have worked it out already with their GT-R.

What remains at the core of all of this is that Audi have excelled. They have built a fantastically good car, in the old romantic sense of the word. A car where production will never keep up with demand. A car that will make Audi owners proud and everyone else rethink whichever brand they’ve just bought into. It’s the best billboard ever.

And I’m all for that. Car manufacturers need to stop the gimmicks, the advertising schlock and just build better cars. That way we all win: consumers get better cars and car manufacturers get chumps like me waxing lyrical about their creations. Super.

Ciro De Siena

Script: So are the days of our Uneventfulness
Season: 43
Cast: Mike Horn, Tina Hope, Cassidy Parker

CUE INTRO MUSIC and TITLE SEQUENCE

Like leaves blowing by on a gentle wind with absolutely nothing happening to them, so are The Days Of Our Uneventfulness.

EXTERIOR: NIGHT

Open on a well appointed study. A man, CALLAGHAN PIFARETTI enters. He is STILL MARRIED and has never HAD AN AFFAIR with anyone. Ever. In fact, he doesn’t know what AFFAIR MEANS. HE isn’t particularly DASHING or SMART. He fixes himself a scotch (which is actually apple juice in a decanter) and stares out of the bay window. In the courtyard below he sees absolutely NOTHING out of the ordinary.

His wife enters and tells him that the company is running smoothly, and there are NO HOSTILE TAKEOVERS from men with poorly executed pseudo-European accents and moustaches.

He asks how his brother Blaise, WHO HAS NEVER DISAPPEARED and will not TURN UP IN A LATER EPISODE AS A SHADOWY FIGURE PROTECTING HIS IDENTITY THROUGH A SERIES OF POORLY THOUGHT-OUT DISGUISES is doing. He is absolutely fine and has no DNA pregnancy cases against him she says.

A dark stranger who is NOT FROM either of their pasts enters the room to inform them that no-one has been possessed by demons and that their daughter’s yachting trip with the prince, who is actually a prince, has gone by very uneventfully.

– — –

This, in essence is the Audi R8: A soap opera with absolutely no drama. If you want drama, buy a Ferrari. I think I saw the ESP traction light flick on once and that was going through a bend on Hel’s Hoogte pass very, very rapidly. There was a bump in the middle of the apex that jumped the car a little to the left, and in the blink of an eye it had rectified itself and just continued macheteing through the corner.

It also is the opposite of a supercar in that when people see you in a Ferrari, or Porsche made after 1999 or an illegal stripper funded Koenigsegg, they are actually filled with joy as opposed to disdain. Entire neighbouroods will spill onto the street to look at the R8. It’s accessible from from every angle.

I just wish they had a better key. And a start button. And a plot that frightened you a little. Kept you fascinated, because the R8 won’t. Long after the sedated thrill of it wears off you’ll wish you had been a little more adventurous- a little more risky. But you weren’t. You have, at the end of the fiscal year bought an Audi. The best Audi on the planet. But an Audi, nonetheless.