BRAND NEW HEAVIES
AUDI RS6
PORSCHE TAYCAN TURBO S
Welcome to the most intriguing clash of Speed Week 2020. Like a chart showdown between Iron Maiden and Billie Eilish – an icon of heavy metal vs something electronic the kids are into – logic suggests completely different entities for completely different audiences. Much like those artists surely live together in Spotify playlists somewhere, though, there’s plenty to suggest these cars might feasibly be rivals. Both are specced to £140,000, both have around 600bhp (the Porsche’s peak 751bhp figure is only for launch control), both dispatch 0–62mph in circa three seconds and both tip the scales north of two tonnes. Yowch. Or not. See, they’ve each been bestowed with an eyewatering amount of technology to counteract their heft. Four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, torque vectoring, ceramic brakes, a roof tent (very optional); some of it adds its own weight, of course, but the rally against the fattening feedback loop caused by an inherently overweight car isn’t to be found here. I was having too much fun to worry about it.
‘RS6’ has been a synonym for ‘fast estate’ for more than a decade now but – whisper it – an AMG E63 does things more excitingly. If you like spending time enjoying a corner rather than ruthlessly dispatching it like it’s an inconvenience, that is. But with the fourth-gen RS6, it’s obvious the team at Audi Sport has benchmarked close rivals, even if the Avant does without gimmicky drift modes, never shutting down its front axle. It’s gained something altogether more useful – handling nous.
Its predecessors are mighty in a straight line but a bit dumb in corners. This one turns in like it’s shed 500kg and halved its wheelbase at the mere sight of an apex. Four-wheel steering really is the magic serum in such a chunky monkey as this, as effective at managing your bolshy overenthusiasm as interspersing pints of lager with tap water on a night out. Nerdy as hell, but it works every time.
This latest Avant is a revelation into corners. But out of them? While up to 85 per cent of its power can go to the back axle, it never cuts loose like an E63, all ‘tie on its head at the end of the wedding’... but now it undoes its top button and loosens the knot. The rear gets involved oh-so-neatly, helping get two tonnes through a tight bend and perhaps allowing you a small slide to tidy up if you’ve slackened its ESP.
One area of tech I haven't touched on is the RS6’s mild hybrid set-up. On track, where its smooth stop/start system has no role to play, you simply don’t know it’s there. Especially when we’ve pitted it against a car that’s skipped a few stepping stones and gone fully electric straight out the box.
I’m going to cut to the chase: the Taycan is a revelation. Getting flustered about its Turbo S badge is a waste of time (it's 20 years since an AMG’s name correlated with its engine capacity), as is fretting about the fact it’s 2,295kg before the driver and their lockdown belly are aboard. Concerns about either are crushed as quickly as its 775lb ft are mercilessly flung at Anglesey’s tarmac, the car's acceleration pulling off the absurd trick of being shocking and drama free, all at once.
And the most talked about noise this year doesn’t emanate from the V10 Lambo or the brutal McLaren, it’s the synthetic tune pumped out by the Taycan’s speakers in its sportier modes. Opinion’s almost entirely positive, too. By its nature, the electronic warble – rising as you accelerate, plummeting as those ceramics haul you to a stop – is fake. Yet Porsche, forever the class swot by nailing down new tech before anyone else, has somehow made it sound eerily natural.
There’s an inherent Porsche-ness to the whole experience in fact, its engineers squeezing more feel and feedback from its futuristic set-up than we could dare imagine. And it truly flatters; push the RS6 too hard and physics will win, sending you wide of the apex, but the Taycan just keeps shuffling power so you cling to your line like it’s a training mode in a driving sim. That does mean it’s less of a yob, less amenable to smoking its tyres than any 911 you care to name. You have to trick it into misbehaving.
But while I’ve climbed out of plenty EVs that are great electric cars, the Taycan is perhaps the first that’s a great car, no caveats. If Audi can pull off similar witchcraft, then the next RS6 could do a lot worse than skip hybrid and go entirely plug-in. Iron Maiden may still rock, but at this festival, they’re no longer a headliner.