Audi Rs5: Full Test Of The V6 Hyper-wagon That Beats Physics

RS4 replacement is a 2.4-tonne plug-in hybrid, yet the engineers promise it’s much more fun to drive Preconceptions can be awfully sticky. Think ‘fast Audi’ and you might still think of understeer and numb steering, but a quick dive into the Autocar archive reveals that all the way back in 2006, we reported that “the [new RS4] even changes direction properly now”, and we’ve heaped plenty of praise on the handling of subsequent generations.Nevertheless, Audi Sport’s engineers are still on a mission to prove they can produce super-saloons that are on the same level as products from BMW M and Mercedes-AMG as driver’s cars. At the launch of the new Audi RS5, its head of technical development, Steffen Bamberger, told us that “we wanted it to be an oversteering car”, to which end the newly hybridised RS5 has gained a very clever, very complicated rear differential that can send power this way and that.On previous encounters, we’ve already found out that the new RS5 does indeed oversteer. Now to see what it’s like to live with and how it fares against the road test timing gear.