AUDI, PARDNER

Think of it as your teenage crush, minus the puppy fat and uncertainty.

Thomas Falkiner would like to propose to the new Audi R8

LIKE your first proper kiss, you never forget your first supercar. Well, in my case you remember your first supercar more. The year was 2008 and I was a 25-year-old giddy with the promise of youth and jacked up on the godlike powers offered by a high-speed testing permit.

With the might of the Sunday Times behind me, I had procured a piece of governmental paper that allowed me to drive as fast as I liked between the hamlets of Springbok and Pofadder. This called for a car with no speedlimiter. And that car was the then recently launched Audi R8.

Licked in jet blue metallic paint with silver sideblades, it had the V8 engine and six-speed manual transmission — the metal gate of which clinked like a grenade pin every time I changed gears. I loved that machine. The sound. The performance. The design. The way it attracted smiling admirers.

The R8 was a happy, friendly supercar. Unlike a Ferrari, you could drive around in one all day and never once feel like a dick.

And so it remained until 2012, when the Audi wunderkind started to feel its age.

Well, now it’s back. After a production hiatus the R8 has returned to make the life of the Porsche 911 more difficult. Visually it’s not that different but then there wasn’t much wrong with the way the first R8 looked.

The Audi designers instead concentrated on bringing it into line with the firm’s current corporate identity. So it gets a Singleframe grille, some angrier architectural angles, and lots of fancy LED lights (lasers are optional) for better cutting through the darkness. The iconic sideblades are now dissected by the car’s shoulder line.

Up close these differences are easy to spot. From 30m away, however, the evolution from old to new is far less discernible.

Some people may feel cheated by this. What they won’t feel cheated by is the new interior. The innards of the old model were tired. Here they’re fresh and contemporary and awash with the ergonomic logic you’d expect from a modern Audi.

The seats, for instance, are now much kinder towards tall people and consequently it’s easier to get your six-foot-plus frame behind the steering wheel. Speaking of which, inspired by the racing world, this now puts the most important controls — ignition and Audi drive select buttons — at your fingertips. In the ’roidpopping V10 Plus model there are two additional buttons: one picks your performance mode (dry, wet or snow), the other modifies the sonic punch of the exhaust.

And unlike in the A4, the Audi Virtual Cockpit — that snazzy digital instrument cluster display system — comes fitted as standard. It’s like sitting inside that spacy future we imagined as kids.

But enough of these spec sheet semantics. You all want to know what this new Audi is like to drive, right? Well, to find out I was invited to thrash a V10 Plus around the all-new, all-amazing Kyalami GP Circuit.

Just to recap, the Plus trumps the standard V10 model with 52 extra kilowatts, carbon ceramic brakes, RS sports suspension and a sizeable rear spoiler hewn from carbon fibre — all for the scant premium of R339 500. Yep, it’s a no-brainer.

Out on the track I found it impressively rapid for a car facing the world without any turbochargers. You need to rev it hard, granted, but who doesn’t take pleasure in revving a screaming V10 up to 8 700rpm? If you don’t, you’ve got to be one of those lifeless, flesh-eating cretins from The Walking Dead.

Although I miss the manual transmission once available in the old model, there’s no denying that the now non-negotiable S-Tronic box is a piece of cog-swapping art. If anything, it just makes the process of driving hard and fast that much easier. In fact, it gives you time to concentrate on how well the new R8 handles.

It’s pert and pointy and, thanks to the mid-engine layout, able to spear through corners with an accuracy lacking in some of its rivals.

Mechanical grip is in ample supply and the famed Quattro all-wheel-drive system now distributes torque between the fore and aft axles both more smoothly and quicker than it did before. In the previous car you could sometimes feel this shifting in the drive forces, but here it is behind the scenes and seamless.

Heightened poise and increased polish. I’ve got to say that this is basically the overriding philosophy behind Audi’s iconic halo model. For the new R8 does not represent radical reinvention but rather a comprehensive refining of what was already such a great machine to begin with.

There’s more power, more pace, more refinement and, most of all, more scope to needle the limits and with more confidence than you might have done in the past.

Think of it as being reunited with that giver of your first kiss. Only that she (or he) has gained some experience, shed a little weight and is now willing to take things to a new level of crazy. And what’s not to love about that? LS