The Ascari private racetrack is 5.4 kms long and swollen with replicas of the great corners of the racing world.
There’s a 180R replica, a backwards, mini Eau Rouge, a Spoon Curve, and a Parabolica. There’s even a corner named after Bathurst, though it bears scant resemblance to any corner on The Mountain.
For all its aggregated character, what Ascari lacks is a big, wide, long straight to let the big dogs howl. The front straight is only 470 metres and though you can crank to well beyond the 250km/h mark coming down the back part of the circuit, the “straight” has two significant bends in it and you have to judge the final one precisely. Delicately.
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These are the things that cross the mind as Audi factory GT racer, Frank Stippler, coerces the bellowing missile that is the second-generation R8 around Ascari.
I’ve driven here many, many times and I’ve been driven around here many, many times, too. But I’ve never before had the same overwhelming impression of how short its straights were. And how dreadfully, horrifyingly, eye-openingly, buttocks-clenchingly fast its fastest corners could be.
It’s no surprise that Stippler knows this car inside and out. He has been part of its driving development team since the R8 program’s inception. It’s also no surprise that he’s oddly handy at the wheel. He’s a factory racer, after all, and he’s spent time in the DTM.
What is a surprise is that the R8 seems, feels, to have matured just so much in its transition to its second generation. We will find out for sure when we drive the coupe later in the year, but for now, the R8 Plus feels like a very sharp tool indeed.
More than 26,000 R8 coupes and convertibles were sold in the long run of the first generation, which may explain why Audi’s dealers around the world pressed the factory for a conservative styling evolution.
So it’s the same 4,444mm length as the farewelled version, but its roofline is 9mm lower (at 1,241mm) and at 1,944mm wide, it’s gained 39mm.
Audi will doubtless draw flack for keeping the turbochargers away from its pack leader, but there’s nothing quite like an atmo engine for endowing a car with character.
The 5.2-litre V10 has been neither embiggened nor overly tickled in its upgrade from its predecessor, but it has found more power. We’re belting around Ascari in the R8 Plus, which will arrive with 461kW of power at 8,150rpm, or around 53kW more than the stock R8. There’s plenty of mid-range, too, with the big capacity V10 delivering 640Nm in the Plus and 540Nm in the stocker.
Audi says it will hurl the Plus to 100km/h in 3.2 seconds, shaving 0.3 seconds from the previous best an R8 could offer. It’s the fastest production Audi in history.
And the R8 Plus sounds like a sports car engine should sound. Pushing the start button on the steering wheel delivers a femtosecond of starter-motor whir before a deep hurrumph crunches the air as the V10 fires and settles.
Even at idle, the engine reacts to blips on the throttle or changes in throttle opening with an alacrity that defies lightning, turning the flat-plane crank’s gruff baritone idle into an urgent, blaring assault on the ears.
And then, when you switch it off again, the entire thing falls silent before your finger has left the button. Seen Le Mans and heard how quickly those motors shut off? Yeah, it’s now like that, so tiny is its flywheel.
Not that it falls to idle much when Stippler is at the wheel. On Michelins chilled by sub-zero conditions, he blasts out of Ascari’s extravagant pit lane on a “warm-up” lap as though it were a qualifier.
With the skid-control turned off, the R8 slides away from the first apex in an all-wheel drift, leans in determinedly for the second and then the back end slides wide at the faster third and fourth corners. And at every other quick corner that lap.
Yes, the noise of the V10 is awesome, bellowing its authentic belligerence to the synthesized turbo world, but it’s no longer the star of the R8 show.
The handling is. There feels, even from the passenger seat, to be a proactive quality to the way the car moves in corners, where the old car was far more reactive. It’s like the car is telling you what it’s about to do seconds before it happens.
Every time the back end breaks away on cold tyres, Stippler has so much time to react that he’s almost languid. Sure, he’s a drift king because that’s the only way to drive historic racers, but every time the front end slides, he just takes a touch of pressure off the throttle and it comes back into line.
They have, he admitted, worked long and hard on the progressiveness of the car’s back end from the apex to the exit and on the crispness and feedback of the front end from the turn-in to the apex.
“It just makes it an easier car to drive fast this way. We worked very hard to make the breakaway progressive, not scary and easy to correct.
“You can either stay on the throttle and drive it out or lift off and wait for it to straighten. That’s how we wanted it.”
It's a step forward (at least, it feels like a step forward from the passenger seat) that quattro boss, Heinz Peter Hollerweger searched for all along with the R8's development and why he brought the race team and its drivers on board so early.
“We learnt a lot from GT racing around the world and we won the ‘Ring and ADAC and Spa and all the great Enduros,” Hollerweger explained. “We didn’t want to waste that knowledge by keeping it locked in the race teams.
“So the same team did both the second-generation road and race R8 and we had the same drivers in the development.
“We got a lot of interesting feedback and thoughts from the race drivers. You can credit the front-end precision, the rear-end aerodynamics and especially the rear-end progressiveness to the race drivers.”
Stippler refused to take that much credit, though he did point out that the engineering and dynamics crew won the debate to give the R8’s engine bay a high-mounted reinforcing cross brace that the design department didn’t want.
“They preferred to have these nice cam covers very visible through the rear window. We pointed out they could make a nice design for the brace instead and they seemed happy in the end,” Stippler said.
You can still see the engine, all 5.2 litres of throbbing V10, but, befittingly, it’s no longer the be all and end all of the R8 story.
The focus has been on extracting better handling from every scrap of the car, from its top speed behaviour (now with 130kg of downforce at 330km/h) to the direction-change stability that comes from dropping the engine into line with the car’s roll centre.
It has gained plenty from its shared structural development with Lamborghini’s Huracan, especially the stiffness of the centre structure, with its carbon-fibre floor and rear bulkhead. The result is a body that’s 40 percent more resistant to twisting forces yet still weighs 66kg less (at 1454kg) than its predecessor. And 58 percent of that sits atop the rear axle. The Huracan, with a shorter wheelbase than the 2650mm span in the R8, is 32kg lighter again.
The R8 keeps the same 1640mm front track width and the 1595 rear track is identical, too, and though the layout of the double-wishbone suspension sounds similar, there’s not a single carry-over part.
There are still steel springs and fixed dampers, though the Magnaride variable system is optional, but if anything, the R8 feels to tread more softly than its predecessor.
Stippler agreed, suggesting that suppleness was one of the keys to the R8’s ability to absorb mid-corner hits without wobbling the body disconcertingly.
“We worked very hard on making the car still give its best grip and feel when it was being pushed over bumps, especially at the front end,” he said.
To get there, the R8 now carries a touch more front wheel travel and stiffer suspension bushes, while the rebound damping is softer.
Stippler is busy at the wheel and he soon admits it’s an unnecessary busy.
“I’m throwing it around a lot more than you need to because I want you to see how easy it is past the limits,” he chuckled.
“This isn’t the fastest way, but that’s not the point, is it?”
With that, he brakes deep for a hairpin, turns the wheel harder than the electro-mechanical steering system really needs and steps back, urgently, on the throttle.
The tail gently breaks away, which it told even the passenger it was about to do, and Stippler lets a lurid, bellowing slide get bigger and bigger, wider and wider, with more and more lock until he flicks the wheel and straightens up again. To him, no harder than putting on sunglasses.
To the R8, too.
Then it screams past its power peak to the 8500rpm limiter, Stippler pulls the upshift paddle and it cracks vocally even as the seven-speed dual-clutch unit whips seamlessly into fourth gear. And fifth and then the straight is gone and he’s having to balance the car on its limit through a high-speed sweeper. At this speed, the old car’s rubber would have been spinning pointlessly on the grass. Not anymore.
The new electro-hydraulic centre diff, Stippler claims, has a big part to play here, able to shuffle 100 percent of the power from the front to the rear and back again in an instant. It means that throttle inputs have acquired a new delicacy and the car reacts to them electrically, especially if they’re being tickled in and out to balance a chassis that’s teetering on its edges of adherence.
When it’s being cranked hard, the V10 is still an incandescent piece of engineering, urgent and crisp, full of induction roar, throttle-body chirps and a series of timbre changes so lurid they leave burn marks in the brain.
It’s incredibly smooth and sophisticated, which seems at odds with its gruff-sounding aggression,
There’s a pair of terrifically grippy new seats (though, sadly, we never got to test the driver’s perch in anger, we can vouch for the passenger seat). But they’re the just about the least impressive thing about the cabin.
The old multimedia and nav-screen has, like the TT, been absorbed into the instrument cluster along with anything else you might be inclined to use for speed, practicality or entertainment.
If that’s not enough, it has a perch behind the seats that takes up to 120 litres of luggage and you can squeeze another 104 litres in the nose.
Audi has always pitched the R8 as the supercar you can drive everyday. Now, more than ever, that’s how it feels.
Just make sure that some of those every days are spent like this, on a racetrack.