Audi RS 3 Sportback 2015 Review

The Romans built roads to last, with bedrock, drainage, edging and multiple levels of overlay and metal, and they aligned them so cleverly that millions of Europeans drive on Roman roads everyday without knowing it.

Yet even the best-built roads in the world succumb to nature’s inexorability if left untended and the roads in the hills around Rome itself feel like they’ve been forgotten since the Visigoths popped down for biscotti and grappa.

That makes it even stranger that Audi chose to launch its new RS 3 Sportback at Vallelunga, the Roman racetrack that destroys brakes and left front tyres just as surely as the roads around it attack spinal columns.

The old RS 3 wasn’t known as the sort of car you’d want to sip an overfilled cup of hot tea in, and the new one superficially follows the same path.

Its body sits 25mm closer to the ground than the A3 Sportback and it’s not like you can rely on the 19-inch P235/35 ZR rubber to claw any of the comfort back for you. If you’re really enthusiastic, you can cut even that back to a 255/30 R19 if you think the front-end needs more bite.

And it rides very, very firmly. To be fair, though, as an Italian resident I know that everything rides firmly around here, so it’s hard to be objectively critical about the RS 3’s ride comfort. There are ruts, potholes and subsidence shears around here that are so big they cast shadows and create their own updrafts.

So while it feels pretty darn firm (and it has fixed-rate damping, so it lacks the TT S’s magnetic dampers that might help soften some of the worst blows), it’s probably better to absorb this part of the road test from the local launch later in the year.

Likewise, but just as critically: the tyre noise. There’s plenty of it coming from the Pirelli P Zeros, but only over the coarsest of the coarse-chip surfaces, when the roar from the back-end of the car can become overwhelmingly annoying at a constant speed. It’s not to be ignored, because Australia has more than its share of coarse-chipped asphalt, but consider this more as a heads up to look at it again when da boyz tackle it in Australia.

It says a lot about the qualities of the RS 3 Sportback, though, that the main areas of criticism are actually just potential areas of criticism to be checked in local conditions later in the year.

That’s because the rest of the package is stupendously convincing. It’s more powerful and faster than Mercedes-AMG’s A 45 and CLA 45 and we are still waiting to see what BMW can throw at it above the M235i.

It’s at another level of equipment and finishing up from any fast-ish hatches from Asia or France and we’ll have to wait to see what the JCW version of the MINI Cooper S can bring to the fight, even though its bodyshell is A1-sized, rather than A3-sized. This is the sort of thing Alfa-Romeo used to excel at, but it's territory they’ve now ceded to the Germans (but we’re still hoping for a return to form).

The interior stretches from the sublime, in its Alcantara-and-leather combination on the perfectly-fitting, flat-bottomed steering wheel, to the ridiculous, in its red closing flaps in the dash vents. And everything in between. And it all kinda works together.

The seats use a black leather, stitched in grey, and while it’s easy to mock Audi’s immodest claims of unmatched craftsmanship, it’s tough to objectively argue with that. Harder, still, when you find one with the optional diamond-quilted seats or the carbon-shelled, fixed-backrest, leather-clad sports seats that are 7kg lighter than the standard units but still boast an integral side airbag.

It carries over plenty of bits and pieces from the World Car of the Year-winning A3, including the MMI screen that slides in and out of the top of the dashboard, the navigation unit, the command system and its complete set of electronic safety devices.

It gets some new bits of its own, including a launch-control system, an oil-pressure gauge, a lap timer and a turbocharger boost gauge inside the left dial on the instrument cluster. It’s a slightly odd thing that adds more light bars as the engine adds more atmospheric bars, but has no calibration numbers to tell you exactly how much of the 1.3 bar of maximum boost pressure you’re actually using.

That’s a very slight pity, because it's an engine so utterly intoxicating that you’re going to want to order the optional Sports exhaust for maximum ur quattro-nicity and you’re going to want to know exactly what it’s doing all the time.

Such a level of detail would be utterly useless on many an engine, but not this one. It’s one of the most charming, evocative motors you could ever hope to stumble across.

Even from idle, it’s gruff, smooth and sonorous and any compliment gets force-multiplied with the Sports exhaust. And force multiplied again with any touch of the throttle pedal.

You might stay for the practicality, the look, the stupendous interior quality and a whole bunch of other stuff, but you’ll initially come for the engine note. It’s a multiple class winner in the Engine of the Year award and even though the core architecture isn’t young anymore, there’s a reason why it keeps winning stuff.

It’s smooth, it’s strong, it spins sweetly and with every full-throttle burst comes a flashed image of a yellow, brown and white S1 quattro jumping and blasting its way through Finland’s forests.

But it’s an engine under threat internally now. The turbocharged four-cylinder engine of the Golf R is getting closer to its power and torque figures at every iteration and Volkswagen powertrain guru Fritz Eichler is determined to make the EA888 four obliterate the 265kW he managed to squeeze out of the 2.0-litre AMG motor he built during his tenure there.

So with 270kW of power from the five-cylinder RS 3 motor, there’s not a lot of white space there and some major upgrades are going to be needed to keep it competitive. Even though it’s just had some major upgrades.

While some of those were aimed at eking out more gristle, a lot of them just had to happen to fit it into the MQB architecture. There were issues in packaging it in the new engine bay, so the entire oil module had to be moved and so did the throttle body, which originally fell foul of the lower nose line.

To find more power, they had to move the intercooler so they could make it larger and then they had to change the route of the plumbing, while the air flow into and out of the turbocharger has been refined, too.

The RS 3 runs a relatively small turbocharger (certainly in comparison to the AMG one, which looks like they pulled it out of a hydroelectric dam), and they seem to have prioritised thumping early performance over high power outputs at the top-end. Knowing that torque is its specialty makes its 270kW all the more impressive.
That torque figure of 465Nm arrives incredibly early, right at 1650rpm, and there is a fair chunk of it available well before that.

And it’s brutally, brutally quick in its early gears. There’s a launch-control mode, but that’s barely needed because it’s got so much step-off torque that the car shrugs off inertia before it’s flying away anyway.

First, second and third gear are batched together tautly (though, on Vallelunga, fourth feels like a big step) and that helps the RS 3 to use every scrap of the massive torque curve, all the time, in every gear. Unlike the AMG A 45/CLA 45.

But it’s not just straight-line, low-speed blasting that impresses with this engine. Its throttle response mid-corner is phenomenal for a turbocharged engine and it means you can balance the car neatly and easily on the throttle on longer corners, shifting the weight from the front to the rear and back again as you please.

The Sport exhaust delivers a wicked, exaggerated crackle every time you fiddle with the throttle openings, too, though it tones it down in the default settings by closing its two exhaust flaps so you don’t attract unwanted and unwarranted attention.

One of the other things that have fallen foul of the repackaging is a manual gearbox. Audi says the demand is trivially low.

The other truth is that even the bountiful parts shelves at the Volkswagen Group don’t have one that would both fit beside the five-cylinder motor and cope with its torque levels in the real world. So a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission is the only choice you can make, even though the 180kg engine only takes up 490mm of space across the bay.

Still, it’s an impressive gearbox, slipping seamlessly through the cogs as well as a dedicated hydraulic tranny, but cracking hard and fast on each upshift. Audi has fiddled with the oil delivery to the dual clutches to search for even more speed in shifting and more durability in service and stretched seventh gear to be tall enough to deliver an NEDC figure of 8.1L/100km on the combined cycle. That extra length in the top gear also makes it quieter when it’s cruising, apart from the rear tyre noise on the worst of surfaces.

It’s all helped by a Haldex V-based all-wheel drive system that’s far, far faster to shift the torque around the car than before, and can send anything from 50 per cent to 100 per cent of the engine’s urge to the rear axle. And if that’s not enough, it’s also got torque vectoring to brake the inside wheels in fast bends and keep the car stable and going where you’re pointing it.

Combined with a healthy chunk of rubber at each corner and a widened track (now 1559mm) for the front-end’s MacPherson strut suspension architecture, there’s bite aplenty at the first part of a corner. The rear-end is wider, too, with the four-link independent suspension system pushed to sit the tyre centres 1514mm apart.

The 1520kg hatch combines all of this with an electro-mechanical steering system that can vary its ratio from 10.9:1 to 15.3:1 and increases its weight and sharpness in the Dynamic mode to go along with the rest of the car.

What that all means is a car that’s brutally fast when you want it to be, especially within (or within cooee, at least) of the speed limit, able to be thrown around for fun while imparting complete assurance about its intentions and there’s always that soundtrack in the background (or the forefront).

With the noted reservations about its ride quality, there’s nothing it does poorly (except avoid petrol pumps). It’s fast, but it’s easy to drive fast and it giggles and bellows its way around tight bends as cheerfully and unruffled as it does with fourth-gear sweepers.

Mid-corner bumps don’t unsettle the tyres on the tarmac, such is its body control, and it just keeps gripping and driving forward. Yet you can happily use it around town or send a less-capable driver off in it without worrying about them.

When you’re not in the mood or situation to push it, you can just live in its stupendous torque curve and enjoy its interior comforts. There’s something for everyone.

The latest RS 3 is an enticing package, especially if Audi prices it as keenly as it has in Europe, where it costs €52,700 (about $A73,000).