    2014 Audi RS 7 to the Cascades. Click image to enlarge |
Review and photos by Brendan McAleer
It is more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. A surfeit of horsepower is a liability on speed-restricted public roads. These are some basic truths I ordinarily adhere to – so what use mile-wide gummy tires, all-wheel-drive and half a Veyron’s worth of firepower when limits are set based on the handling characteristics of Corollas on low-rolling-resistance tires?
Well…
Here I am, sitting a comfortable distance behind a poky crossover ignoring the pullouts all along a winding road leading ever deeper into the Cascade mountain range. Ahead, the satellite navigation shows a route that shucks and jives like the inkwork of Salvador Dali’s signature, but it’s a pair of double yellows that underline the way the drive’s going to go.
In an MX-5, you’d need patience, and a little more room. With this beast, you just need a waver in the road, an opening, a sudden change from double-yellow to a dotted-line on the right. It’s the briefest of straights, a slight hillock showing clear road ahead and legal permission to effect a pass. “Hang on,” I tell my passenger, “We’re jumping to plaid.”
With a hissing roar the big red Audi lunges forward, going for the jugular. Little drama, immense speed – there’s simply a gargantuan wave of thrust and we’re past and into clear roads ahead, the road wriggling through the pines as if it wasn’t in any particular hurry to get where it’s going. I am: we’re four hours behind schedule, there’s miles to cover yet, and daylight waits for no man.
A loop through the Cascades, that’s the plan, a brief road trip for college buddies who now have kids and mortgages and enough burdens of responsibility to want to set them down for a while. The Audi’s growl fades to a purr as the speed comes off, but it’s still relentless, coursing along as if that big grille has caught the scent of bigger prey.
I like small cars. I like nimble, deft machinery that requires a driver to stir the pot with a snick-snick gearshift and work hard keeping the momentum up. I prefer knife-fighters to broadsword battlers – but then here comes Audi with the nuclear option.
This bright red (Yes, officer?) Audi RS7 packs a twin-turbo 4.0L V8 under its hood, one that huffs out a scarcely-credible 560 hp. It’ll eat a base-model R8 for lunch, put the boots to non-turbo 911 variants, and essentially run amok through most sportscars, bloody to the elbows. When first I heard of it, my immediate thought was: well now, that’s a bit silly.
Given the pace of the standard S6 and S7, the idea that even more power was somehow warranted seemed ludicrous. Never mind over-egging the pudding, Ingolstadt has doused it in kerosene and then crowned it with fondant made from plastic explosive.
But here we are with 21-inch alloys and ultra-low-profile tires, and an eight-speed automatic to handle a colossal 516 lb-ft of torque. A torque-vectoring rear differential and Audi’s Quattro all-wheel-drive work to get all the power to the ground in the most effective manner possible, and the gigantic 390 mm brakes shed speed like deploying a drag chute. Hundreds of computers run thousands of subroutines millions of times a second, measuring and recording and reacting faster than any human could. Given the slight sterility of the S7 model, the RS should be faster, but not necessarily enjoyable. But it is. Sweet mother of pearl, is it ever.
  2014 Audi RS 7 to the Cascades. Click image to enlarge |
I’ve had the opportunity to drive a 2004 RS6 before, the only model year Canada got them. Automatic, heavy, complicated – any computer dating service would have skipped over the match. But I loved it, and I love this.
We’re late leaving because of a flat tire that stranded the car for 24 hours while a replacement was sourced. Audi’s roadside assistance worked just fine, and the dealership went above and beyond, but the fact remains that this is a car with no spare and demanding rubber. That I don’t love.
Intending to leave at eight a.m., we end up hitting the road at two. Despite a quick border crossing, that leaves us just a few hours until nightfall, and in an enormous sedan/coupe/liftback painted the colour of a red flag, making time on the highway was absolutely out of the question. We just couldn’t afford to get stuck behind any dawdlers.
With Teutonic titans like this, sometimes the sense is that the car is bred only for the Autobahn, a high-speed environment that simply doesn’t exist in North America. The RS7, on the other hand, feels like it was made to pass stuff. Anything. Everything. Om nom nom.
Hammering down the canyon road leading into the gingerbread Bavarian fairyland of Leavenworth, we come upon a black TT coupe stuck behind a camper van. When the way clears, the driver of the TT gives us the “let’s go wave” and zips off ahead. Tickle the throttle and the RS7 growls and reels in the smaller car effortlessly. We get a thumbs up and an enthusiastic wave.
  2014 Audi RS 7, Leavenworth, WA. Click image to enlarge |
On the road, the big red Audi is relatively smooth, comfortable, slightly tending to rough thanks to those enormous wheels. The interior is a gorgeous wood and aluminium pinstripe, with diamond-quilted seats and a cockpit-like layout. For this kind of money, I wish the seats had adjustable side bolsters standard, but it’s a lovely place to be.
Certainly the RS7 owner we ran into in Wenatchee, WA, seemed to think so. As evening fell, we pulled into a Safeway parking lot for supplies, and were buttonholed by an older gent who had a good look over the option list – “The seats are nice. I have different wheels. Colour’s great” – before waxing ecstatic on just how fast the damn thing is. “I love mine,” he says, “I just never thought I’d see one in Wenatchee.”
Neither will most of that small burg’s residents as we’re back on the road quickly, turning North and heading for lakeside Chelan, our overnight stop. The sky is darkening, and soon the rumpled high grey clouds turn purplish with the fading light, the stained hem of an apron used to carry freshly picked blackberries.
  Lake Chelan. Click image to enlarge |
The windshield of the fast-moving Audi becomes insect armageddon as we whisk through the warm air along the water. The navigation is spouting a nonsensical hundred-mile circumnavigation, so we ignore it and head West, the onboard computer finally snapping out of it with mere miles to go. Roll in, unpack, nightcap, bed.
In the night, the storm comes.
At three a.m., both iPhones scream to life with flash flood warnings, and then lightning strikes the lake. The rains come lashing in against the windows, and thunder shakes the house, as if Zeus and Thor are having an arm-wrestling match. The stutter-flash and rumble go on for hours.
In the morning, the ditches are filled with dirty water the colour of chocolate milk, and fans of gravel show where midnight streams once coursed across the road. With coffee under our belts, we cross a bridge, head up into foothills and fog, and finally find ourselves on the other side, in the flatlands of Eastern Washington.
  Grand Coulee Dam. Click image to enlarge |
The road runs out before us, unbroken and empty, with golden fields to the left and right. Dire Straits is playing on the stereo – Telegraph Road – and as we pass under the long strings of high-voltage power lines, it’s as if we’re driving down the fretboard of Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Les Paul.
Then the road rises back up and we’re into the clouds again, coming around the bend to find the Grand Coulee Dam laid out before us. The largest concrete structure in the world, it seems to bend the landscape with its massy presence as we stop at a desolate hilltop lookout to take it all in.
Luck is with us and not with us: as we trail through town, I notice a regular thump coming from up front. We pull over in a parking lot to check the massive treads for a rock stuck in there, and there’s a sudden hiss that matches my deflating spirits. We’ve somehow picked up a nail: two flat tires in three days.
  One does not simply drive into Mordor. Click image to enlarge |
It could be worse. Grand Coulee is small, but big enough to have a tire shop capable of making a repair. There’s a little league game on the TV, and the other techs are all changing knobbly tractor tires. From flat to back on the road takes under an hour.
The next hour or so has me checking the onboard tire pressures every ten minutes, convinced we’re going to get another flat and get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The rains return, and soon we’re back in a misty landscape, scarred by fires. Tree trunks are blackened and burst, the hillsides scorched. It looks like Mordor.
But by lunchtime, the confidence is back and the roads have changed again. There’s still plenty of cloudburst and spray, but this is the sort of weather the Audi was built to handle. The steering isn’t quite as feelsome as it could be, but it drives like a smaller car and chews up and spits out anything the road can throw at it.
  Winthrop, WA, Concrete, WA. Click image to enlarge |
When we pull into angle-parking in the tiny resort town of Winthrop, a kid near the window nearly breaks his neck whipping around to gaze at the Audi. The RS7 has that effect – it’s rare, enormous, clearly purpose-built for speed. People who don’t know what it is glance admiringly. People who do know what it is are practically licking the windows.
Despite (repeated) tire incidents, I share their affection for the big red beast. While the practical side of my brain recoils at the pricetag, and figures the turbodiesel version would have been nearly as good, there’s something about the RS7 that’s a bit special. It’s not just the power – all the little changes versus the standard car have given this executive cruiser a character. It’s smooth, but it’s brutal, an all-wheel-drive muscle-car that leaves you anything but cold. All that, and average fuel economy is hovering between 10-11 L/100 km
The final stretch: a spaghetti noodle of tarmac draped over the rocky spines of the North Cascades. The RS7 eases out of town, and finds itself alone out in front again, a solitary red dot in an ocean of greenery.
|
Destinations: Related Articles: Manufacturer’s Website: Photo Gallery: |
The road ahead beckons. The Audi grumbles impatiently. Vorsprung durch technik – advancement through technology. Sturm und drang – storm and urge. We go.
Pricing: 2014 Audi RS7
Base price: $115,000 (3dr)
Options: $25,100 (B&O audio – $6000; Audi active lane assist – $600; Vision package (heads up display) – $4,000; sport exhaust – $1,000; Carbon trim – $4,200; driver assistance package – $2,300; power rear door closers – $500; alcantara headliner – $3,000; Audi dynamic ride – $1,000; oak and aluminium interior trim – $2,000)
Freight: $1,995
A/C tax: $100
Price as tested: $142,195
Competitors:
BMW M6 Gran Coupe
Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG
A GT-R with a Thule.
Crash Test Results:
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)
