Why we’re running it: Audi’s everyman sports car is bowing out after 25 years and its five-pot is on borrowed time. Let’s celebrate both
Month 1 - Specs
Life with an Audi TT RS: Month 1
Welcoming the TT RS to the fleet - 18 August 2023
It’s the noise that will get you first. Rasping and raucous from cold, it evolves into a reassuringly mean-sounding thrum as the temperature builds, echoing obnoxiously but hilariously off the car park walls as you nudge towards the exit.
Whereupon, should you have sufficiently warmed the engine through and the road ahead is clear, you might see fit to liberate the entirety of this five-pot’s vocal range, which becomes ever more boisterous and unruly with each ascent towards the redline.
It grunts and growls with increasing alacrity as the revs build, the turbo whistling to announce its presence as pressure builds, towards a crescendo that puts you in mind of some of the greatest rally cars to ever pound this earth – and then you get to shift up and do it all again.
I like it, basically. Really like it. Even were it not for the commemorative, eulogistic nature of our time together, the snorting, thumping TT RS would have already got well under my skin for the sheer viscerality of its accelerative behaviour.
Such as it is, I’m basically looking for any excuse to fire it up, put the exhaust in Sport mode and enjoy the soundtrack wherever I can. I can’t vouch for the neighbours’ mutual appreciation.
Perhaps you will excuse a degree of antisocial behaviour: nine in 10 of the cars I drive at the moment make no noise at all, and the ones that do tend to emit a somewhat soulless melody, one that’s either devoid of character by dint of having no aspirations to sportiness, synthesised to the point of disingenuousness or stifled by mandated emissions-inhaling hardware.
The 2.5-litre turbo five-cylinder unit in the nose of the TT feels, comparatively, like an exercise in automotive theatre. And that’s after Audi was forced to fit a petrol particulate filter in pursuit of reduced CO2 output. Which is basically why it’s here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the oldest car currently occupying a space in Autocar’s ever-varied long-term fleet garage. Our Kyalami Green example (which I point-blank refuse to name after any famous Muppet, ogre or Marvel superhero, no matter how much anyone else might be inclined to) wears a shiny new 23-plate, of course, but it will be one of the last top-drawer TTs to do so because the model line is bowing out in 2023 after a quarter-century of service and has yet to be confirmed for a revival of any kind.
