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From YourSITE.com Reviews & Road Tests It’s 1AM and I’m getting sluggish. It seems the 24 Hours of Le Mans is an endurance feat for spectator as well as driver. As the R8s blast their way down the front straight of “le circuit” through the chicane and off past the Dunlop Bridge, a gateway into endless darkness, I make my way to an Audi V.I.P. hospitality suite called the “R8 Racing Lounge”. It’s directly across the track from pit row, a quiet and stylish oasis from the bawdiness of the “village” or the loud ruckus that surrounds the race team trucks. I lean heavily against the wall of the glass elevator as it moves me up two floors. The lounge is fairly empty, filled with the most hardcore spectators who’ve decided not to head back to their hotel rooms. For these most avid, I learn Audi has several activities planned to pass the night, one of which is a ride in the new RS 4 on the tarmac of the airport across the street. Characteristically like a Rave party, I’m hearing about it at the last minute and it looks to be one of the highlights of my evening. At the very least, it’s a wakeup call, wrenching me from my weariness.
19-inch wheels, the newest version of Audi’s Dynamic Ride Control, a cool part-alloy steering wheel and much, much more round out the ride, making it the most anticipated model from Audi in any recent history I can recall. They’ve offered me a ride. Sure, it’s not a drive. I’ll have to live with that, but it’s on tarmac, with no other cars around. I add my name to the list and wait patiently in the stadium style seating of the R8 Racing Lounge until they call my name – listening to Radio Le Mans and keeping the second Fourtitude Race Report current. Then I get a tap on the shoulder. One of the attractive French women attending the signup desk tells me it’s time to go. My blood starts to pump in anticipation. It’s now about 2AM. I’m punchy, but I’m about to get a ride in the new RS 4 for the first time under the shroud of darkness. Given my state of tiredness, the cover of night and that I’m not driving, I keep mentally telling myself to try to remember every detail as I ride in the shuttle through the dirt roads of the airport to the far end of the runway. Under the moon and some flood lights Audi has brought in to help illuminate the area, I step out of the shuttle to see three RS 4s sitting eerily in the darkness while I hear the song of blazing Le Mans racecars not more than a half-mile away. There’s a red one, a gray one and a black one, and it appears they’ve been giving rides part of the evening at the hands of some professional French drivers.
I walk briskly to an awaiting RS 4 and slide into the car. There’s a smiling Frenchman at the wheel, wearing a yellow Tom Kristensen DTM baseball hat. He greets me as I land into the car’s gripping passenger seat. I lazily notice the start button on the center console between us. I glance over at the steering wheel, which I get a quick look at before the door is closed behind me and the interior lights go off. My eyes adjusting, I scan the instrument cluster from my passenger seat vantage point. In the information window at the center of the cluster are several similar rows of zeros, preceded by the terms “Lap 1”, “Lap 2”, “Lap 3” and so on. I recall Audi has included a lap timer in the new RS 4, and this must be where one can see the readout. It’s pretty trick looking and as I reach for my camera, he hits the accelerator and we’re off. No photo for me. There’s a long straight that we fly down as we rapidly depart from the starting area. The exhaust note is intoxicating, and it feels like we’re going pretty fast, but the long distance of acceleration combined with the utter darkness outside, illuminated now only by our headlights, makes it hard for me to guage just how impressive or rapid our acceleration is. We hit a couple of chicanes and the RS 4 feels crisp and flat. The tires howl a bit in protest as we aggressively power through. We approach another patterned set of cones. The driver turns left slightly and then a hard right, throwing the weight of the car first left, then right. It’s standard oscillation effect that most quattro owners have learned as they purposefully power slide in the snow to learn the physics of their vehicles, though this is on dry tarmac. The driver manages a slight drift by staying hard on the accelerator and we’re through the cones.
There’s another set or two of those cone chicanes, then it’s time to turn around as we reach the end of the Audi-designed cone course. Again the driver oscillates the weight, this time really standing on the accelerator as the weight finally shifts right, the new 40:60 split Torsen all-wheel drive system coming into play as the car manages a smooth, wide, drifting oversteer that brings us around eventually 180-degrees and we’re screaming off back to the starting point. Laughing giddily from both the impressive ride and my own tiredness I get out of the car and fumble for my camera. As I do so, I see they’re looking to go out again, so I slide back into the RS 4 – this time into the back seat. I have my wits about me this time, and I grab for the camera and slip it to the movie position. We’re off again, though this time our driver stays on it too long in the first chicane and then again in the 180-degree turn back to the start – the oversteer getting the best of him and we’re sitting looking in the direction we came - not once, but twice. With the new split all-wheel drive and the stonking torque to make use of it, oversteer seems surprisingly easy to induce (perhaps even too much) by our driver. Obviously the ESP system was deactivated. He apologizes in French to his three passengers and as we move back towards the starting point, he turns the car around for another pass. I restart the recorder and we’re through again. This time, there’s no full spin, though I notice he’s a bit more reluctant to drift the car around the full 180-degrees as he did on his first perfect pass. Nevertheless, I’m dually impressed at his performance, though ready to lose my dinner as we roll to a stop. Focusing on the camera’s screen during hard cornering and drifting is not the smartest idea, especially when you’re jet-lagged and sleep deprived.
I need some photos though to prove I was here. It’s now about 2:30 AM, and should I knod off as I eventually would under my desk in the media center back at the race, I want to prove to myself that this wasn’t some surreal dream my mind concocted. There’s no tripod, so it’s a matter of setting the camera on the ground and hitting the 3-second timed delay to shoot before I can move my tired and jittery hands away from the camera. By the time I’m satisfied with the couple of clear shots I’ve gotten, I notice all but the Audi personnel have left. The Audi personnel are tearing down the nearby tent and stuffing it all in the back of a Volkswagen Transporter. I grab the last shuttle back to the track and trudge tiredly back to the media center to brag about my experience to my travel companion - our photographer who’s there with SpeedArena.com. He’s impressed, but I think happier to see me because I managed to find a burger to bring him from somewhere along the way. He’d sat for hours watching our gear as I’d awaited my RS 4 ride in the more luxurious Audi R8 Lounge and doesn’t feel all that empathic when I mention how tired I am. The RS 4 leaves me impressed. As I groggily wade through the predominantly blurry night photos several hours later, I’m thinking I definitely want another stab at the car – this time from the driver’s seat. There are details I don’t remember now, like the sport seats North Americans won’t get – the ones that grab you in the hind quarters as the driving gets more sporting. There are other things I just couldn’t get a feel fore like steering and throttle modulation in normal and sport modes. Thankfully, I have my hand-held video I shot, which gives me some better memory of the ride, and a vivid recall of the sexy exhaust note. At some point, I’ll have a shot to drive it, though for now am glad to share what little I got, in the middle of the night outside of the track at Le Mans. With luck, we’ll have some of the video clips up shortly, though for a limited time. Look for them very soon, and probably during a slow period of traffic for the site, such as a weekend. Fourtitude will notify on the front page when it can be found, but in an effort to not exceed our bandwidth, the video footage will not be found on the site indefinitely. NOTE: A copy of the movie is now live on our servers through the low-traffic weekend time period. rs4_lm_small.mov
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