Audi R8 V10 RWD review: the sensible supercar

Audi’s ‘sensible supercar’ can peel your lips off your teeth and then push them back towards your ears.

Blisteringly fast: the Audi R8 V10 RWD hits 100km/h in 3.3 seconds

Among the many annoying things about being staggeringly rich – the aching wrist from your stupidly heavy timepiece, the pangs of guilt that you should probably be paying more tax – would be people asking you the same questions, over and over. Trust me, I know, because every time I borrow a supercar I pretend, with all my might and the help of one stupendous prop, that I’m one of them.

And the endlessly repeated question that must grind the gold teeth of people who own fleets of stupidly expensive cars is this: “But why would you bother? The speed limit in Australia is only 100km/h, you can’t go faster than that.” This question shows an admirable respect for the traffic laws of this country, and an understandable ignorance of just how titillatingly tremendous supercars are to drive, all the time, at any speed.

From the front

Well, at least the sensible ones, like the Audi R8 V10 pictured here, which is basically the less attractive sister of Lamborghini’s decidedly mad Huracan. Both brands are part of the giant Volkswagen Group and, as such, they were instructed to share a vicious V10 engine and build their own dream car around it.

This 5.2-litre naturally aspirated monster can make as much as 449kW and 560Nm in the R8 and it is the number one reason that it doesn’t matter how or where you’re driving this car, it will make you happy – even if you’re stapled within the envelope of your city environs by a global pandemic.

Yes, it can give you an eargasm when it hits its maximum power point at 8250rpm, but the fact is it makes great, growling sounds all the time – when you start it up in the morning, when it shifts down a gear, or even in the poofteenth of a second it takes you to go from 20km/h to 70km/h. (The fact that the V10 sits right behind your left ear only improves the experience.)

Inside the cabin

That’s the other thing about this engine, and this car: you don’t need to be going stupidly fast to be vastly impressed. Obviously, one answer to the “why would you” query is that even 100km/h feels fast when you hit it in just 3.3 seconds.

But a V10 engine like this makes you feel fast all the time. It’s in those little moments, the gaps in traffic that open up, that favourite bend off the end of a bridge when suddenly there is no traffic in front of you. You don’t need to break the law, or even leave town, to be staggered by the acceleration of a car like the R8.

Then there are the g-force grins – the way this Audi can peel your lips off your teeth and then push them back towards your ears when you make a darting lane change, or throw it at a long, crushing bend.

Shifting gears yourself is fun, revving the engine wildly at every opportunity feels compulsory and somehow, magically, the R8 doesn’t ever feel like it wants to kill you.

That’s just one thing that makes this the sensible choice for anyone looking to buy a supercar. There’s another, more practical reason: in most things this low to the ground you are constantly worrying about how you’ll get into driveways or negotiate speed humps, but the R8’s nose never scrapes, nor do its undersides graunch.

I even took it up and down ramps in a multi-storey car park (these, along with tunnels, are something you seek out for the acoustic thrills when you have a V10 engine and you can’t leave town) without giving myself a coronary over scraping the sides.

The particular R8 I had was the wild one, however, because it’s the RWD (rear-wheel drive) variant, which means it’s cheaper ($295,000, compared with $395,000 for the V10 Performance), and has less power than the range-topping all-wheel-drive R8 (down to a still profound 397kW and 540Nm). It might be less powerful but it does make your palms sweatier because its tail is far more fond of stepping out for a dance.

The other reason that people choose to buy supercars, even in a country with such restrictive limits as ours (many grown-up nations allow 130km/h top speeds while Germany simply says “have at it” on the autobahns where an R8 belongs) is that they are just so enjoyable to look at. I once visited a gazillionaire in western Sydney who had built his house in such a way that he could park three of his Ferraris in the living areas, and even added glass stairs so he could see his favourite at all times.

The Audi R8 is a mostly attractive car, particularly its fierce front end, but for me the design falls apart at the rear, where it looks like the designers ran out of money and just threw plastic at the problem (it’s a real shame, too, because the bit just above that, where the V10 sits proudly under a piece of glass, is glorious).

The rear end is a bit of a mess

That slight failing in the looks department is a subjective call, of course, and some people love it, but the trade-off is that you can have one of these cars for under $300K, which is not something you can say of any of its more visually arresting competitors.

Would I buy one? (That’s another question I hear a lot.) Frankly, as hard as I try, I can’t even imagine spending that kind of money on any car, but I can absolutely see why some people would.

Audi R8 V10 RWD

ENGINE: 5.2-litre V10 (397kW/540Nm) Average fuel 12.2 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic, rear-wheel drive

PRICE: $295,000

STARS: ★★★★