Audi TT 2009 Review

What price is a single letter of the alphabet? Well, about $40,000, if the letter is an R you want to add to the Audi TTS. That puts the TTRS at about $140,000 – a fair hike above the $98,000 of the TTS.

So what do you get for the extra whack? There’ll be extra fruit to set it above the rest of the range, but the most important part is the engine.

For the TTRS this means a 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbocharged engine that develops 250kW of torque between 5400-6500rpm and – for quite a small car — a neck-snapping 450Nm of torque between a very low 1600rpm across a broad band to 5300rpm.

That makes for exuberant acceleration and a 0-100km/h time of 4.6 seconds. There’s a 250km/h limiter nanny, but it can apparently be removed on request in Europe, letting the needle climb to 280 – essentially fast enough for unlucky insects to become permanently embedded in the windscreen laminate.

But are the engine and its performance enough to justify a price jump that by itself could buy a complete car – albeit perhaps not one so desirable? Certainly there’ll be other goodies when the Australian spec is decided, but with what’s already on offer in the TTS, adding the R to the equation means it will have to be more than the sum of its parts.

Oddly at that price, it misses out on the chance to have the adaptive multi-mode dynamic system, but Audi’s magnetic ride suspension – in which you can adjust the alignment of ferrous molecules suspended in fluid to give a softer or tauter ride – will come as standard.

And the standard spoiler will be the bolt-on, but the pop-up version is extra, as is Bluetooth connectivity for your mobile phone.

Driving

But get the car going, and the sticker shock starts to fade into the background a little. There’s not much to not like about being in the TTRS. You dovetail yourself into the snuggy seats, set up the steering wheel and slingshot forward.

The driver-biased layout of the cabin gives the impression that the car is wrapped around you, and it’s easy to start feeling part of the machine.

The short-throw six-speed transmission is delicious to use — even when it was on the unfamiliar right-hand side, which is usually even less right for this almost exclusively left-handed person.

The steering is the best we’ve seen on an Audi, and the car claws into the road at every turn, encouraging you to challenge it more. And it sounds great, letting out little threatening snarls at the slightest throttle irritation, and opening up with great howls when pushed to anger.

The downside mainly comes as niggles, with you getting exasperated at depending on the small side mirrors to compensate for the poor rear visibility that results from the – admittedly gorgeous – signature roofline.

It still has the useless tiny sunvisors we hate in the rest of the TT models, and you have to wonder why in a car at this price point – or this level of stated concern for comfort and satisfaction – they can’t spend a few extra euro to include a visor extender, plus (while we’re on a soapbox) the double visors we’ve seen in models like the Q7.

During our preview drive in Germany, we pulled into a carpark to be greeted by the sight of a white TTS decked up with R8 accessories – including fake carbon sideblades intended to pass it off as being more closely related to Ingolstadt’s halo car.

Tragic really. They could have just waited and bought the TTRS.

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