While I’ve been off work slowly dying of some hitherto unknown strain of plague (I’ve got the flu), I chucked on the first Iron Man film for a bit of background noise. In that film, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark is supposed to be the coolest man on the planet. Infinite resources, a genius intellect, endless popularity with the ladies and a flying suit of armour that shoots lasers at Jeff Bridges, you know, normal stuff. You’d think a man like that would drive some billion-dollar, cutting-edge hypercar, hewn from unobtanium and dipped in gold, but instead the producers decided that what the coolest man on earth drives… is an Audi. But not just any Audi…
In the early 00s, you couldn’t really describe Audi as “sporting”. Yes, they had rally pedigree, but the Quattro hadn’t raced since 1986, and Audi’s contemporary offerings weren’t really cutting the mustard. The RS4 and RS6 were very fast but ultimately a bit leaden and dull, and the promising new TT had just had its chassis neutered because of its fatally wayward handling. And so, bored of losing magazine group tests to BMW and Mercedes, Audi decided to pull out all the stops to develop a brand-new range-topping “halo” car that could resurrect their sporting credentials. Luckily, Audi is part of the larger VAG (Volkswagen-Audi Group) empire, and as such had an incredibly diverse parts bin to pick through. Starting with the chassis of a Lamborghini Gallardo, Audi’s engineers stripped away the Italian bodywork and ditched the unreliable 5.0 litre V10 engine, instead swapping in the 4.2 litre V8 from the RS4 sports saloon, before passing the car over to Audi’s design boss Frank Lamberty, who decided to adapt one of his old concept car designs from 2003. What Audi ended up with was a car that drove like a Lamborghini, went like a Porsche 911, was built like an Audi and looked like a concept car come to life. The only thing left to do was name it, which they did by christening it with the same name as their five-time Le Mans winning racing car; the Audi R8.
Hitting showrooms in 2006 (I still remember one arriving at our local Audi dealer, I used to gawp at it every time we drove past) the Audi R8 was an instant icon, amassing enormous waiting lists at dealerships and earning acclaim from the press thanks to its beautifully balanced chassis and punchy V8 power. As noted by David Vivian from EVO magazine;
“There are faster supercars but we can’t think of another currently in production that takes a demanding road apart with quite the surgical precision and cool-browed composure of Audi’s hugely desirable R8. The outcome we doubted we’d ever witness. Audi humbles Porsche.”
But the genius of the R8 wasn’t just it’s pin-sharp handling, it was the fact that Audi hadn’t sacrificed any of its usability. The R8 was comfortable, decently practical (for a mid-engined supercar anyway) well-built and surprisingly cheap, coming in at a sniff under £80,000 new and cementing itself as the go-to “entry-level” supercar, a truly attainable dream machine.
As far as most could see, there was only one real issue with the R8. With 414 horsepower on tap, it struggled to punch above its weight, not really able to go toe-to-toe with the more rarified Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the world. Well, not yet anyway. You see, Lamborghini had spent the intervening years co-developing a new 5.2 litre V10 for the new Gallardo, when Audi came knocking once more. Now sharing a chassis and an engine, the R8 and Gallardo were more closely related than ever, so a few concessions had to be made. To avoid treading on the 560 horsepower Lambo’s toes, the Audi would be detuned to 525 horsepower, but this still proved to be plenty, a clear thirty horsepower over the Ferrari F430, ten more than my beloved Aston Martin V12 Vantage, and outgunning every Porsche 911 bar the turbo-nutter GT2, make no mistake, muffled its performance may be, but the R8 V10 was by no means a slow car.
In the following years a few different variants of the R8 sprang up. They lopped the roof off to create the R8 Spyder, it was pumped full of track-day steroids and turned into the R8 GT, slick tyres and a massive wing turned it into the R8 LMS racing car, there was even a one-off diesel version that utilised the twin-turbo V10 TDi engine from the Volkswagen Phaeton. Before the second-generation R8 hit showrooms in 2015 (this time based on the architecture of the then-new Lamborghini Huracán) Audi’s engineers decided to give the original car one last hurrah in the form of the R8 V10 LMX. Finally uncorking the Lamborghini V10, the LMX wasn’t detuned, producing the full-fat 570 horsepower and allowing it to finally crack the 200mph barrier, with additional swathes of carbon fibre lopping some 40kg from the kerb weight and a new fixed rear wing generating functional downforce, the LMX retained the R8’s compliant suspension, turning it into a car that could attack both road and racetrack.
If I’m honest, the subsequent generations of R8 never managed to recapture the magic of that original car. Gone was the V8, meaning that the R8 could only ever play second fiddle to the faster, lighter Lamborghini Huracán. Perhaps the biggest crime though, was that it didn’t look anywhere near as good as the original. Where there were once sleek lines with subtle aggression and myriad little details to spend hours poring over, the replacement R8 with its flicks, wings, vents and scoops always gave off the impression that it was trying a bit too hard to look “cool”. Luckily, with prices of early R8s now comfortably down to about £30,000, the old attainable dream car is still right where you want it to be.
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