Spreading the Aggregate

A last minute change of plan during the final hours of Le Mans led me to borrowing a car off Audi to drive home in. They gave me a 250 BHP V6 engined A6 with a four-wheel drive system that was perfected whilst in use on one of the finest rally cars ever built. I knew I was going to enjoy the drive home. This car is more than 100 horses more than anything else I’ve driven (Military truck, London bus and Artic aside), it also has an extra cog in its gearbox, this car is a six shooter in all senses of the word. BMW beware, at least that’s what I thought.
Heading towards Paris the car really showed how much attention to detail had been paid to the car, and more specifically the whisper quiet and very torquey V6. The car was happy at speeds in excess of 140mph and I found myself fiddling around a bit with the switches and toys to find out what they all did. Some I never fathomed, a button marked ESP seemed to do nothing to the car but I did know what was around the next corner long before I got there. Another one told me how long I’d been driving for, after two hours it started flashing at me, as if to say – “you’ve been driving for more than two hours – you must stop” – well sod off, I know how long I’ve been driving for – since I started. Actually £400 Golf has this same gadget, except on the Golf it has a name and another function. It’s a very clever gadget, it even tells you the time as well as telling you how long you’ve been driving for, its called the clock. Obviously, the designers at Audi had an oversight when putting the A6 together as they clearly thought the clock wasn’t capable of telling you how long you’d been driving for. So they fitted an extra toy to tell you, thing is it gets it wrong – all the time. Worst of all you can’t turn the damn thing off! It just sits there flashing at you.
Driving at some speed something dawned on me, this car was not so much an Audi, it’s more Auto Union. As the car starts to shrink continents and pounding the auto routes of Europe the heritage of the four inter linked circles play on my mind, that heritage and those V16 pre war beasts.
What about the BMW’s then? Well whilst the BMW is brash, arrogant, obvious and something of a hooligan, the loud guy at a party with the dyed hair. A BMW lets you know that it’s a driver’s car, that it’s got huge power and that it’s flash. Why do you think Gangstas like them so much?
The Audi on the other hand is the quiet one who just sits and smiles, slightly amused by the antics of the BMW party animal. It’s simply a bit more grown up, a bit wiser and just a little bit more intelligent.
At the end of the party, you may well find that the BMW is in the garden throwing up after showing off in a drinking contest with Mercedes. The Audi on the other hand has slipped off quietly with the best looking bird there. The BMW has an inferiority complex, whilst the Audi is quietly confident. Perhaps the same can be said of the drivers (or perhaps on that point I’m talking utter rubbish).
After all BMW love to shout about how they make driver’s cars and how they are a sporty marque. Yet which company has the more spectacular competition history?
Driving the thing around South London it proves another characteristic. This car is not just a car, it’s like something out of a German fairy tale, I’m not talking gingerbread men and Christmas cake, I’m talking about the monster that lives in the woods outside Ingolstadt, the big bad wolf, this car is not all nice and gentle. It’s perfectly capable of being extremely rapid in the twisty bits and I suspect it would be very capable on a certain long German race circuit – the same one so favoured by BMW.
The car wasn’t all Teutonic superiority however, the steering was quite vague and was it was impossible to be confident on the limit, in fact it would take a very brave person indeed to try to set a quick lap around the green hell. Under braking the car wandered quite badly, and the engine was just far, far too quiet. Perhaps the engine needs to have a bit more noise, it certainly does when you are returning from ‘Le Ronde Infernale’ after nearly 30 hours being awake.
And this car would cost me more than £30,000 to buy new, that’s gotta be a hell of a lot more than what this Audi gives. In fact for that money I’d have a set of bike engined McCoy’s!
 

Stig of the Dump