I’ll eat my Davy Crockett hat if you don’t play this Audi R8 V10 plus dyno video at least three times.
It’s short, very sweet and burrows deep into a petrolhead’s pleasure cortex – or whatever that bit of your brain is that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
At last, a car manufacturer – and who’d’ve thought that it would be Audi to break the mould? – has made an advert that petrolheads want to see. A hot car going full bore on the dyno in a to-top speed acceleration run. The 5.2-litre, 542bhp, R8 V10 sounds pretty darn ballsy at full tilt, and there’s even some distinctly pleasant blue flame from the hot twin exhausts on downshift. Yum!
We see this latest R8, the ‘plus’, and surely the last one before a redesign, skulking on the dyno with the engine burbling, as the video starts. The go-pedal is suddenly floored, the V10 barks into action, and the four-wheel-driving supercar sets immediately about its acceleration business.
It blips up through its sequential ‘box at full throttle to a lovely gruff soundtrack, and then blips down again to a stop; flaming all the way. Just over 1 minute of petrolhead nirvana; no pants marketing message, just the rear bodywork removed to show the V10 engine and double-trouble exhausts, and some well-placed microphones. It says; ‘this is what we do, we think it’s badass, if you do too, go buy one…’
At £124,675 for a new R8 V10 plus, there’s not that many of us that’ll be nipping off to our local Audi dealer after savouring this video a few times, but that V10-powered happy thought earned by watching this here movie will be deeply buried in our brains forever, and when we do win the lottery, hey, you just never know…
Would I buy an Audi R8? Well, I’ve driven the V8 and V10 R8s extensively and while the V8 needs a bit more grunt; the V10’s got plenty, and both cars look quietly menacing, with interiors to die for. But, the R8 would only make it into my dream garage of plenty; it wouldn’t make the cut as my only daily-driver supercar.
Yes, you could drive it every day; the R8 being one of the true useable supercars – like a top notch Porsche 911 – but for me, the R8 doesn’t have the exotic looks and sound – that V10 needs to be louder and rev higher – that my one and only supercar would have to have. It’s a beautifully executed car that’s fast and grippy, but it feels like it was designed by the very best computer minds in the galaxy and then assembled to perfection by the very best robot engineers on the planet next door.
Fast Audis have always been clinically supreme at what they do; the ‘old’ RS6 twin-turbo V10 got very close to being my perfect mind- and time-bending near-supercar of choice with its absolutely bonkers powerplant and pitbull styling, but never the R8. For me, Audi’s super-low, super-sleek halo supercar simply slips under my radar of desire.
By Dan Anslow
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