"Please,
slow down," Peter says calmly as we cut through the curvaceous Pacific
Coast Highway.
The central screen on the high-definition LCD instrument
cluster of the Audi quattro Concept shows 48 kmh, or just over 29 mph.
Is he serious?!
"Okay, sounds good," I reply.
A
quick downshift into second gear and a dab of the touchy 15-inch carbon
ceramics turns our slow pace into a near crawl. The wrist slap lasts
only seconds, though. A short uphill straight resides ahead, and my urge
to go faster can't be ignored.
My
right foot lowers to send the 408-horsepower turbocharged inline-five
cylinder heart past 4000 rpm, and the mill immediately responds with the
deep, offbeat rumble only a healthy straight-five can make. Every
sound echoes through the barren carbon-fiber cocoon. With each lull
between gear changes comes a delicious WRC-like WHOOOOOSH!!!! from the
wastegate. Upshifting shoves us back into the carbon-fiber buckets as
torque and speed increase.
"Please! Please! Again, slow down," my German-born passenger says, now annoyed at my blistering 42-mph run.
Peter
isn't afraid of speed. As one of the lead creators of the last two RS 6
models (the ones packing around 500 hp), he knows speed well. He is,
however, afraid that I'll turn his latest pride and joy into another
inanimate object. It's completely understandable -- the car is
unofficially valued at more than $5.2 million.
But
the quattro Concept represents much more than an ueber-hefty price tag.
Its existence is a celebration of the original Sport Quattro's 30th
birthday. If you missed class, the Sport Quattro
was a limited production, stripped-out, purpose-built,
barely-streetable road car that demonstrated the cunningness of
all-wheel drive outside of the era's usual SUV or truck applications. If
it wasn't for the Sport Quattro and the tedious research and
development behind it, many road cars, not to mention racecars (hence
the WRC-esque wastegate), would be quite different today.
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