Sorry it was t'other forum.... Here it is...two drives:
Car spec: Mythos black with alu pack, SS seats, mag ride, standard exhaust.
Appearance in the flesh: black not the best colour IMHO but the car looks very solid and well finished - quality item! Not a hot rod hot hatch, more a proper shrunken RS. A car for grown-ups, not like a Honda, Renault or Ford. Or Merc A class for that matter.
Seats and interior: grey SS seats superb, very supportive and plenty of headroom for my lankiness. Mono pur nice but not worth paying extra for. All controls very well weighted and everything felt like it was from a bigger more expensive car.
Steering pinpoint accurate in comfort mode but a bit too pointy for my liking in dynamic but I'll probably get used to it. I found I was taking a few bites at corners before I got it just right, wheras comfort mode was just a bit more relaxed and smoother. Feedback was fine and not too much kick or rumble from bumps - a nice car to cruise in - just enough isolation from the bad bits of the road without taking away the clues about what's going on on the surface of the road. Just how I like steering feel to be: a accurate but not coarse/rough.
Ride: a total revelation. Ok it's no limo but ****** hell it rides well! This is what amazed me most about the car. It's fabulously well damped, always in control of its wheels and body but it's actually quite comfortable. In dynamic mode it just sharpens up a bit and you can feel the smaller bumps a bit more, but even small potholes didn't crash and bang. Remarkable. 10/10. Better controlled but yet more comfortable than my
B7 RS4 and miles more comfortable than wifey's Golf 6 GTI which rides like a plank. If you've not specced mag ride: do it!
Engine: smoother than I'd expected but with some real attitude when it gets going. It's an angry thing when pushed, but smooth and creamy when not. The exhaust made all the right noises, a growing fizzy snarl at the top and some pops and bangs on over-run. Just a bit too quiet though. Glad I specced the sports exhaust. Standard is a lovely noise but too quiet. Lots of torque everywhere as you'd expect. This one was of course brand new and should open up a lot with some miles but it felt so smooth and unburstable
Not a grumble when I floored it at 7th at about 30mph (sorry - but I had to test it!)
Performance: a lot faster than it felt. It's that smoothness again. I'm used to my RS4 which is a bit more raw and less insulated so every time I checked the speedo I was doing 20mph more than I thought I was. Got told off many times by the dealer for going too fast! Absolutely towering, crushing performance, definitely faster than the RS4, but so civilised and slightly insulated it feels like it's not trying. That's what I want from a car but it won't suit everyone. I fulled out of a junction and floored it, some lag, it certainly shifted but didn't exactly go ballistic, then I noticed I was against the limiter and I was in manual and had started off in 2nd. Quite a take-off for starting in 2nd though! Later I did it properly in S mode and it took off like someone had picked up the car and thrown it - no wheel spin, weave or lurching, just 0-stupid in no time.
Brakes I couldn't test properly (wife...) but they were certainly firm and progressive and not grabby.
What else....? Downshifts smooth but not as instant as I'd like when I use the paddles. It seems to hesitate a bit before deciding to shift down after I've floored it, whether in S or M. I had the engine/transmission in dynamic all the time.
Drove my second RS3 demonstrator on Friday. Bedford Audi, Sepang, alu pack, silver SS Seats, standard exhaust, mag ride, 255 tyres.
Great colour
Classy and handsome and not too eye-catching, like the car. Just how an Audi should be.
Alu pack nasty on any colour, even more glad I'm going for standard body colour trim. They had a couple of other cars, a 4 something and a 5 something, both in Sepang but with the gloss black pack. Didn't like it. Blue and black don't work together for me. Each to his/her own. Likewise the silver seats; no thanks. If they want to do a different colour to black, then I'd rather see light tan or dark red.
Exhaust too quiet. Grey wheels look nice though. Still happy with my choice of basic silver ones as I can't live with diamond cut - too easy to damage, expensive to fix and they look even more dated than the plain rotors.
The roads were quite different to my first drive at Cambridge. Lots of big roundabouts and dual carriageways. This exposed an interesting handling characteristic (well, to me anyway...) Modern road designers have got this habit of designing things to slow you down all the time, like putting hedges and other obstructions so that you can't see whether something is coming round a roundabout have to slow right down until you can see, only at the last possible few yards before the junction. Another of their tricks is to build a bad camber on the exit of roundabouts. As you leave the roundabout, it always curves sharply left, and where you'd really like to have a bank to the curve, they camber it the wrong way so that you 'fall off' towards the outside of the bend, slowing you down. ********.
So what did the RS3 make of this? It behaved like a road designer's wet dream. As you accelerate out of the roundabout and accelerate to pass the car on the inside lane, the car keeps all four corners rigid, rides up the camber and then as the camber falls away, the car tips over the crown of the road and 'falls' towards the outside of the bend. So it's flat and simply follows the camber. The sensation is like you've tipped over and rolling a lot towards the outside of the bend. You're not of course, it's the road that is tipping down, but the steering goes light and it feels like the track has suddenly got narrower. Slows you down and you lose that 'planted' feel you normally have. It did this every time. I was in dynamic mode for both dampers and steering.
So I went round this route again and tried comfort dampers and steering. Completely different car! What camber change? Instead of the car rising up and then falling over the camber, it just flowed through it, the wheels moving up and down rather than forcing the body up and down. No sensation of the car falling or going light; it just went round the bend and flicked two fingers to the road designers.
Maybe dynamic mode would help for bump and camber-less race tracks but on real roads it's definitely worse. I'd love to try a car with no mag dampers to see how it compares, but whatever you do, I highly recommend you give comfort mode (for the dampers at least) a chance and don't autromatically select Dynamic, thinking it's going to handle better. Real roads need some suspension travel and in Comfort setting, the RS3 is awesome. On the way home I did the same bends in wifey's Gofl 6 GTI and it almost took off and bounced around like crazy at a lower speed than tha RS3 was able to do. Shame I didn't have the RS4 there that day but I think it would have soaked up the camber change very well but had a bit of a float and lost some accuracy as its extra weight and softer dampers failed to totally check the movement.
Nothing else to report, Yorrick out.
