Saturday, 17th April 2021 |
9:41 AM BST
The 90th running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb gets underway in Colorado this weekend, postponed from its original July 8th date by the devastating Waldo Canyon fires which brought havoc and destruction to the region. And Audi USA has cooked up something special to mark 25 years since its most dominant victory.
I’ve never been a great fan of an RS ‘plus’ model being in Audi’s range, as far as I’m concerned ‘RS’ implies, “this is the best we can make it”, so what does a ‘RS plus’ mean? We lied?
If you’re a UK Audi customer, then you’ll need to petition loudly if you hope to park a new A1 Quattro on your driveway, but will many of you bother? Just 333 examples of the A1 Quattro are scheduled to be made, but they’re all left-hand-drive and bound for mainland Europe in the second half of 2012.
When you’re up against a product such as BMW’s MINI, you need to pull out all the stops in order to differentiate your own luxury sub-compact model – at least that’s what Audi thought when it introduced its A1 last year.
Audi finally lifted the wraps on its much anticipated TT GT4 at last weekend’s final round of the DTM series in Shanghai. The TT, developed by the Technical Development and the Production divisions plus quattro GmbH, is intended to extend Audi’s new modular customer motorsport program from 2012 onwards.
It counts as a ‘good day’ in our book whenever Audi launches a new RS-model, it used to be a rare occurrence because Audi only made 1 RS model at a time, but that’s all changed and we’ve now got 3 RS Audi’s to choose from, or at least we will when in spring next year the RS 3 Sportback goes on sale.
The timing of this new RS 3 model is nothing if not convenient, with BMW’s 1 Series M Coupe due on sale just 3 months later. In fact there’s plenty more these natural competitors have in common – both are powered by turbocharged engines producing nearly 340 bhp, both are to be priced just under £40k (or maybe slightly over in the BMW’s case), but they’re as near as dammit rivals in the usual apples-and-pears way that Audi’s RS models square off with BMW’s M Cars.
This week containing an EXCLUSIVE interview with new WRC driver and internet sensation, Ken Block, an M-Power special featuring BMW’s E46 M3 CSL and E92 M3 Edition, plus a road test of the Quattro-tastic Audi TT RS. Enjoy!
To mark the launch of the new five cylinder 340PS TT RS, Audi have commissioned a downloadable ‘music’ track which is available now on…
