Audi TT 2007 review

Sure, he might admit he’d made her a little overstuffed in the lip department the first time around and tone that area down to something more recognisably human, but otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot of tweaking required.

Improving on perfection isn’t easy, even for God, so spare a thought for the poor pencil pushers at Audi who were asked to redesign the TT.

This car was groundbreaking when it arrived, back in 1998, was then awarded the highest form of praise by other companies as they tried to copy it (check out the roofline on a Nissan 350Z, for example) and still – today – looks futuristically cool.

In fact, it looks like some oversized rollerskate from that excellent movie, Tron.

I imagine a series of meetings with the red-eyed designers turning up time after time with a car that looked pretty much exactly like the old TT.

“Seriously, we changed the colour of the indicator reflectors – it’s a totally new car,” they would plead.

Actually hacking into those fluid lines to come up with something quite markedly different must have felt like sacrilege.

The first few times I saw the new shape I got angry. Why on earth would anyone mess with a one-off like the TT? Why didn’t they just start again and call it something else? But after a week of intimate time with one, I must admit I’ve done a backflip of Olympic, or even Politician standard.

The new TT isn’t as attractive as the old one, but viewed in isolation, it’s still a pretty sharp, hawk-beaked looking vehicle. My neighbour even described it as being “a bit too porn star” for her taste, so it’s not exactly a sleeper.

It’s derivative without being damaging to the original concept and it grows on you. It may yet be seen as a classic in its own right, but that will have more to do with the way it drives than how it looks.

The one area where the designers definitely got it wrong, however, is the interior. As good as the old TT looked from the outside, my favourite feature was always the cockpit, which just felt – and looked – special.

It was the shiny, garage-door style cover for the stereo that topped it off, but generally there was a sense that the interior had been designed to reflect the exterior. And it worked.

The new car is merely another Audi inside, with plenty of nice-feeling plastics but no character or pizzazz – with the obvious exception of the flat-bottomed steering wheel, which is a thing of boy-racer beauty.

Luckily the TT has so much character elsewhere that you’re entirely willing to overlook the innards.

Because, while we can debate over whether the look of the new car has matched the old one, the new TT is a far, far better thing to drive.

It is one of those cars where you just know, in the first five minutes in a heavily trafficked 60km/h zone, it’s going to be special.

It has a taut, on-its-toes feel for the road. Muscular, meaty steering – at last – and an exhaust note that is as different from its forebear as Kylie Minogue is from Ozzy Osbourne.

The old TT had a pleasant enough rasp to it, while the new one blows raspberries at rasping and gives out an angry, howling growl, which is at its best on the over-run and when running from the horizon.

On a favourite bit of road, the new TT put on a display of corner-biting, scenery blurring genuine sports-car behaviour.

It handled and went and stopped like, well, almost like certain other brands that Audi just never competed with before, in such a serious way.

The old TT was fun enough, but it always felt like swinging a slick, aluminium baseball bat compared with a fine piece of willow, or a sword.

Driving the new one gets your pulse racing the way looking at the old one did. Impressively, the model we were driving was merely the base model, powered by a 2.0-litre turbo FSI engine with 147kW, good for a 0 to 100km/h time of 6.4 seconds.

Even the fact that the engine only drove the front wheels wasn’t as annoying as it should be.

And I just have to mention the steering again. Not usually an Audi strong point – they more favour the light approach than the premium lager – it really does the business here, connecting you with the road at broadband speeds.

So, with the inherited looks of the old TT, but a good 30 per cent more fun, this new Audi is one of the company’s best efforts ever.

Even a pricetag of $68,900 starts to look like reasonable value.

Most people will spend $72,500 instead and get the S-tronic flappy paddle auto box. The fools.

I’ll admit I’m keen to try the top-line V6 quattro version, for $88,900, not so much for the 3.2-litre V6 engine (reportedly it weighs the nose down too much and takes some of the free spirit away), but for the all-wheel-drive gripfest – and the 0 to 100km/h time of 5.7 seconds sounds like fun, too.