Three weeks ago something inside me felt as though it may have broken. Something visceral, in the literal sense.
It happened on the launch event of the very capable new Audi E-tron GT. And it wasn’t a result of dinner – often the scene of plutocratic, manufacturer-underwritten expansiveness but which here consisted of a burger van laid up in a dimly lit car park outside Heilbronn. If anything, that made it all nicely familiar – a bit like being on a group test in Wales but in a parallel corporate universe.
Whatever it was that broke, it happened as a consequence of Carsten Jablonowski pointing the most comically over-endowed RS Audi since the Quattro S1 E2 down a damp slope and popping off a launch-control start.
It wasn’t an especially clean start, but considering the slickness of the surface underwheel, it was still frighteningly effective – and with 912bhp on tap, neither was it slow.
As if to goad less mature owners into using the launch-control feature at any opportunity, a stopwatch can be called up in the instrument binnacle. It read 2.8sec for 0-100kph – not slow but not exactly supersonic by today’s standards either.
And yet I felt like I’d just downed two steins of the local brew then pegged it up three flights of stairs while wearing a corset and a respirator. I was at that moment unexpectedly wrecked. Jablonowski – wiry, laconic and every bit chassis engineering’s answer to Clint Eastwood – looked at me, his face wearing the veneer of a smirk in which I detected traces of guilt. I should hope so.
Two things stood out. First, the uneasy and lingering sensation that one of my vertebrae had nicked an artery on the back of my liver. This persisted for a couple of hours.
I’ve never had anything like that before, despite being flung around race tracks by Frank Biela and Walter Röhrl (in fairness, both men were indescribably economical at the helm) and through a seven-foot snow bank then down into a Finnish forest by an apologetic Bentley engineer (less smooth).
The odd pulled muscle and bruised rib? Sure. The feeling that something anatomically a little untoward had just happened? Never – until now.
The second thing was the double whammy of faint vertigo and the sense of the stomach in freefall, either of which can be desirable in a performance car if delivered to just the right magnitude. Not so here: too much of both.
This was odd, because I hadn’t felt either sensation in years. In this job, you become a bit immune to speed, to the extent that I was perturbed on the road test of the current Porsche 911 Turbo S, during which repeated 2.5sec runs to 60mph weren’t eliciting the speech-stunting excitement I know they once would have.
The teenage me would have found this incomprehensible; I found it a bit sad. The tangential point here is that when it comes to speed, it’s good to safeguard your innocence. Going fast is laugh-out-loud fun in a primal sense, and if an Alpine A110 still feels rapid to you, you’re winning the wider petrolhead game.
Getting back to the main point, the Audi left me gasping for breath in a way that ICE cars simply don’t any more. But why was it so discombobulating and unpleasant despite being not uniquely quick?
I suspect that being a passenger didn’t help, rather than being at the wheel. When you’re in control, 2.8sec to 62mph probably feels like 3.5sec; if you’re not, it feels more like 1.8sec.
The nature of the acceleration is also unrelenting, and this really made the difference. An ICE car hurls you forward then takes a breath to engage second before going again.
Engine speed rising, as well as some shape in the rate of acceleration, gives valuable context to what your cerebellum and vestibular system are logging. It grounds the experience. A near-1000bhp, four-wheel-drive EV is by comparison a form of sensory deprivation.
Interestingly, it was at about 60mph, when second gear would normally arrive but at which point the Audi just kept slogging onwards, that the show reached its zenith, or perhaps its nadir. The cumulative effect seems important. One second of being rammed back into your seat and pinned there is fine.
Two seconds is okay. Three seconds feels like an eternity and was the point at which I started to feel like an ant rapidly circling a plughole, or a waxwork starting to melt. The Audi’s official 0-62mph time, by the way, is 2.5sec.
Word to the wise for would-be owners keen to show mates its potential: be sure to have some waivers printed off and stored in the glovebox for your unwitting victims to sign.
