Audi R8 Performance review: truly fast, viscerally exciting... and pretty good value

Sorry, but having fun at 280km/h is more important than having angst about plankton.

Audi R8 Performance, est. $410,000

As I write, hundreds of men and women with unnecessary hair are blocking up London by staging Kumbaya singalongs and holistic wellness seminars at key intersections. It’s hard to understand what they want, exactly, as their keynote speaker is a girl of about eight who probably still believes in unicorns. But I think it has something to do with climate change and being bored.

Presumably they would very much enjoy the life I’ve been leading for the past couple of months. I lived on an island off the coast of Vietnam where there were no hire cars. So I used a bicycle, and each day would pedal through a jungle, in the sunshine, to the fabulous market where I would buy fresh fish and unusual vegetables.

I’m back in London now and it’s all a huge shock. First of all, you can hear birds singing, which, thanks to the constant horn-blowing, you cannot in Vietnam. And second, instead of a bicycle, I have been getting around in an Audi R8 Performance – the fastest road car to wear those four rings.

There have been beefed-up and hunkered-down versions of the R8 before, and it’s hard to see why the Performance is faster or better. It produces only a little more power than the old Plus. And yet it’s quicker from 0-200km/h than a Porsche 911 Turbo S. With a top speed of 330km/h, it’s faster flat out than a light aircraft.

But it’s not the speed that really matters in this car. It’s the feel of the thing. And that comes from the fact that it uses a V10 engine. Almost all cars these days are turbocharged, and that’s fine. Turbos produce the power and the torque while keeping the polar bears happy. However, comparing a turbocharged engine to a normally aspirated V10 is like comparing a piano to the organ in St Paul’s Cathedral. When you put your foot down in a V10-powered R8, and the double-clutch gearbox works its magic as you rocket down the road in a blizzard of G and thunder, it’s hard not to think, “This is what a supercar is meant to be like”.

I’ll be honest with you. After two months of driving nothing but a bicycle, and with news of those eco-halfwits filling the traffic reports, I did think for the first day or two that cars of this type were a bit stupid and unnecessary. It was hard to watch Sir Attenborough in that new Netflix series, gently castigating us all for messing up his film set, and then go to work in a car that sounds like a volcano.

After a few days, though, normal service was resumed. I began to realise a V10 is better than a bicycle and having fun at 280km/h is more important than having angst about plankton. I began to appreciate the engineering, too. This is a massively powerful car and it makes do with a gearbox that has only seven speeds. Which made me question why my gap-year bicycle needed 21.

And then there was the Audi’s ability to settle down when driving round town. It would glide over speed bumps without scuffing its nose, and would jiggle and wiggle over potholes without transmitting news of the shoddy workmanship to the seat of my pants.

There were one or two irritants, though. They probably thought they were being ever so clever moving the screen from the centre of the dash to the instrument binnacle. But when you turn the wheel to back into a parking space, you can’t see the reversing camera. And the bonnet catch was so stiff you had to take a running jump at the bonnet to get it to close properly. Oh, and an awful lot of stuff is an optional extra – the diamond stitching in the roof lining, for example, costs £2500 ($4700). And how small does your penis have to be before you think, “Yes. I need that in my life”?

The car itself is quite good value. I know this is not a view that would go down well at the holistic wellness seminar, but it is, actually. For a truly fast, viscerally exciting, all-wheel-drive, mid-engined supercar that you really could use every day. There’s just one problem. The whole point of a supercar is that you don’t use it every day. It’s meant to be special. Something you take out only at weekends. So, while I admire the Audi and I liked driving it, I’d always spend a bit more and go for its virtually identical twin sister – the even more viscerally exciting Lamborghini Huracan. Because if you’re going to buy a car that annoys Sir Attenborough, you may as well get one that really annoys him.

Audi R8 Performance

Engine: 5.2-litre V10 petrol (456kW/580Nm)

Average fuel: 13.1 litres per 100km

Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch automatic, all-wheel drive

Price: Est. $410,000 (in Australia late 2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars