The bloody bus, as it happens, is a 572bhp Audi RS6. Don't judge me. Don't look smug just because I'm on the grass. It was a conscious decision: the car simply wouldn't go where I wanted it to, and I had to choose between turning the steering wheel some more and risk sliding off into a wall, or just letting it go straight ahead onto the turf. So the car gives me a choice - to land up onto the lawn and make myself look like a cabbage or try to save my face and look at the world upside down. Fair enough, I choose being a dipstick. Better than being a smear. The mistake, if anything, was Audi's - one of their rare ones, yes but a mistake nonetheless. You don't - just don't -let people drive around a track in a low, flat, sticky supercar and then put them in a farmer's wagon and say, "Oh, just go do the same thing." Even if, as I said before, the farmer's wagon in question happens to be the most powerful, evil and bloody minded estate the world has ever seen.
All the more so because the Audi RS6 isn't a track tool, a track car is light and low, with specialist brakes and tires. It has finesse, agility and delicacy. Audi RS6 on the other hand, is a hydrogen bomb with some luggage space. You don't pilot the RS6 as much as punch in the authorization codes, pray feverishly as the numbers count down, hope the President hasn't got it all wrong, and watch distances go up in mushroom clouds. In a straight-ish line, there is nothing as fearsome. Oh, all right. It's down to the whole track-day thing that it seems to have the steering capability of a musk-ox on ice. If I hadn't driven the R8 just moments before, I'd have been a bit gentler on the steering, a bit easier on the brakes, and would have given a bit more thought to the cabinet hauling potential.
It's only on the cool-down lap that I get a chance to assess this thing while so far, I've just hung on. Inside, it's all amazingly normal. Typical Audi quality, typical Audi fetish for black, typical automatic gearbox, typical practicality even down to the cargo nets in the continent-sized boot. No hint of it being stripped out or purpose built, no faux carbon fibre, no new rid badging. You start it up and it has a fairly typical Audi noise. You start moving and it has typical Audi steering and typical A6 brakes and that feel way too light. Then you move some more and the typicality goes to hell in a f***** hand basket.
There's nothing remotely typical about the boom to get every time upshift about the violence it does to your kidneys each time you downshift or about the 180 you see on the speedo at the end of a not very long straight, on a cool down lap or the way it takes corners when you allow it to be an estate instead of a sports car, with crazy grip and surprising fluidity and there’s definitely nothing typical about the fact that it gives you some 0.00001 milliseconds to think before it gives up on you and aims for the wall.
Its only when you pull up into the pits, hands trembling, that’s when you get your head around what you have just experienced. Some utterly rabbit bastard at Audi stared hard and long at the BMW M5 and decided the only way to top it would be haul a Gallardo engine bolt on two Jumbo Jet engines and call it a twin-turbo motor for a family car. I apologize, if I seem to reiterate myself over and over, but I just can't get over this 572bhp, 650Nm. In a body-style that's meant to carry Labrador Retrievers.
Oh, sure it's been beefed-up underneath, with heavy-duty suspension and wider tires and bigger brakes and fancier algorithms in its electronic brain. But normally, when you want to use an engine like this, you create a special body to haul it around. You create a Lamborghini, in fact. Even the RS6's closest rival, the M5, makes you go through 200 different settings and Power and M and make-your-will-now buttons to ensure you really want to do this. The RS6 does nothing of the sort. It's just like a normal car, even down to the way it rides on the grass without breaking your spine. You could put your grandma in this, and she'd be perfectly comfortable with the interior, the controls, and the way it feels. Then she'd press the accelerator and she'd die. The only warning you get-is a very subtle body-kit. Flared arches, large intakes, and the optional blue paint of course. For the rest, it's Cujo, the big, friendly St Bernard who bounds up to you and tears your leg off.
If you were skilled enough and had enough warning, you just might be able to use this as a normal, everyday car for the most part, and use the insane power only when you're really, really ready. The only thing that isn't comfortable is the price - around Rs 68.0 lakh and that's in Europe - but then, even Audi isn't mad enough to bring this into India, where it would outdo infectious diseases, terrorism and tsunamis as a man-slayer.
I have outgrown the infantile fascinations I had about this car. So what would I use this thing for? Track days? Certainly not. Going to the shops? Are you mad? Touring around Europe? Possibly, though there wouldn't be much of Europe left post the trip. I am not sure I like those odds.
No, I know what I'd do. I'd rather take up film-making. And then I'd direct a bloodcurdling movie called Attack of the Thermonuclear Vampire St Bernards from Outer Space, and I'd cast the RS6 as the big boss. Then you'll know fear.