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.