Luxury Insider

With active damping systems becoming more common in sporting cars as well as saloons, resolving the trade-off between ride and handling is becoming less of an issue. As with the TT, Audi’s magneto-rheological ‘Magnetic Ride’ system is an option, but one that we consider worth having.

Magnetic Ride gives the R8 a level of ride comfort that would shame many sports saloons, while maintaining iron-fisted control of body movement when you are pressing on with the Sport setting engaged. In fact, even in the Comfort setting, you can go very quickly into bends on the road without feeling that you need to switch to Sport.

Pressed into the first few bends, the R8 quickly shows off its user friendliness. The race style double wishbone front and rear suspension keeps the 235/30ZR19 and 295/30ZR19 tires on 8.0J and 11.0J x 19-inch alloys working near optimum in extremis. Mechanical grip is ferocious, and until you get the R8 working seriously hard in the bends, it feels unerringly stable and totally planted.

Stabilizing understeer is modest, and it is easy to rotate the tail to neutralize that by trail braking into the bends. When the rear-biased torque split gently moves the tail into power-on oversteer, it does so with a progressiveness that is rare amongst mid-engined cars. In fact, it telegraphs not just what it is doing, but what it is about to do.

Until we drove the R8 on track, we considered the Porsche PSM system to be the best driver-oriented electronic stability system out there. If you apply steering and power smoothly, it will allow you to exit a bend with some drift angle on, only jumping in if you are ragged and get the car out of shape.

The Audi R8 has the latest ESP Version 8 system that allows the driver to select the amount of intervention according to road conditions. With the track setting engaged, we were pleasantly surprised at just how much oversteer angle we could crank in before the ESP light started flashing to signal intervention of the electronic nanny.

The quattro system provides a huge advantage, pulling as well as pushing, so you can exit corners quickly and cleanly. If you want real power oversteer, ESP off and second gear exiting a hairpin or tight bend is the way to go.

The power-assisted rack and pinion steering is not the most informative system out there around the straight ahead, but things get better once you are in a turn. Importantly, its input and the chassis response are in tune with one another; just do not expect it to describe every wrinkle on the tarmac.