Audi RS 3: Jeremy Clarkson’s review

For one week, I actually became England’s worst driver. This is how.

Rather fast: the Audi RS 3.

I saw a dead man recently, and it made me sad. He’d obviously got up as usual and had breakfast with his wife. They’d have talked casually about what they were doing that night, whether the kids would be home and maybe made some plans for the weekend. Then he’d gone out, climbed onto his motorcycle and set off for work. Except he never got there because at a busy junction, he and a Toyota Prius had a coming-together. And that was that.

Two days later I saw a stupid man cycling along the Earls Court Road in London. You could tell from his corduroy jacket and huge beard he was an ecomentalist, a point he was determined to prove by pedalling along with his three children in a flimsy, almost invisible trailer behind his bike.

There was a time when this might have been fine. London’s roads felt safe, partly because the speeds were so low but mostly because everyone sort of knew what they were doing. That certainly isn’t the case any more.

The motorcyclist had been hit by a minicab. And it was a minicab that bloody nearly wiped me out last week when I went to buy the newspapers. He was on completely the wrong side of the road.

The problem is this: there’s so much globalisation these days. The Big Mac you buy in Los Angeles is the same as the Big Mac you buy in Moscow. Cars are the same, too, but the way they are driven definitely is not. If you’ve been to Rome you’ll know what I mean. The driving there is completely different from the driving you find in, say, Houston, or Bournemouth. Then you have Vietnam, where everyone gets into fifth gear as soon as the car is doing 5km/h. Eastern Europe is naked aggression, Paris is belligerence and India is dithering. And people who’ve learnt the skills needed to get by in their own country are now in London, in a Prius, and it doesn’t work at all.

You’ve got the chap from India hesitating nervously, not sure what lane he should be in, behind the chap from Poland who reckons that the traffic lights signal the start of the grand prix. When the lights go green, everyone crashes into one another, except the southeast Asian man, because he’s going at 5km/h, in fifth, the wrong way down a one-way street, wondering what the bump he just felt was. And then is alarmed to find it was a bearded cyclist.

The problem is you can’t lump all minicab drivers into one pot. They all do different things all the time. The only thing you know for sure is if the Prius is in the left lane, indicating left, it doesn’t mean it’s going to turn left.

The upshot is that the Prius is now the worst-driven car in Britain. Or, rather, it was until I borrowed an Audi RS 3 recently. It has the same 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo engine you get in the Audi TT RS, and that’s a car I love very much. It produces 294kW in a car the size of the RS 3 – think Hot Wheels – and that means 0 to 100km/h is dealt with in about no time at all. The potential top speed is 280km/h.

Of course for many years there have been Audis that could travel quickly in a straight line, but in the recent past we’ve started to see Audis that can go round corners quickly as well. This is another. With sensors and algorithms on hand to decide which of the four wheels gets the power, the RS 3 is a car that just flies down a country lane. It’s a joy. It also feels beautifully made and, provided you leave it in Comfort mode, it’s firm but not hideously bumpy. However, there are two reasons why I could not and would not buy this car. Well, three, if you include the price, which is a lot for a car of this size, no matter how much grip’n’go it’s got.

But worse is the sat nav system. Even when you’re used to it, it’s a fiddle to use. It needs to be simplified. And then there are the brakes, which screeched every time I went near the pedal. I found myself coasting in neutral up to red lights, but this is tricky in London because a Prius usually arrives on the scene from nowhere and you have to brake to miss it. So then I adopted a last-of-the-late-brakers attitude, cruising up to the stop sign and jamming on the brakes at the last moment.

This rarely stopped the screeching but at least when you do a sudden emergency stop, you don’t have to put up with the racket for long. It did, however, alarm quite a few other road users and I’d like to apologise for being, for one week only, the worst driver in the country.

AUDI RS 3 SEDAN

ENGINE: 2.5-litre turbocharged five-cylinder petrol (294kW/280Nm) Average fuel 8.3 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: Seven-speed dual-clutch automatic, all-wheel drive. PRICE: $84,611 RATING: 3 out of 5 stars