25 Apr 07
It's a car you could use every day - although not for the weekly shop - but its main role is to be so good to drive that you'll drive it for the hell of it. But it's also a car that looks so stunning that you'll also stop for the hell of it, so that you can sit at a roadside cafe and admire the car, and watch other people admiring it. Maybe this wears off. It certainly didn't in our two days spent near Marseille masquerading as R8 owners.
While we sat there sipping our proper tourist-spec cafe au lait, passers-by would stop, backtrack, look at the engine through the clear cover, go around to the front to check the badge, peer through the side window to check out the speedo, go around to the other side when they realised it was a right-hand-drive car, then stand back and smile.
And on the move, we'd see drivers of A3s and Golfs and Sierras - in fact, drivers of nearly everything - winding down their windows to get an earful of the V8. It's not loud enough for some - not least Andrew Frankel, who wrote 4Car's full road test of the R8 in January - but there's a lot to be said for an engine that's quiet when you want it to be and loud only when you floor the throttle.
It is, after all, a car for successful grown-ups. If you're Audi's target buyer you're a man in your forties, in a household with a monthly income of £8,500, and you're also considering a 911 Carrera 4S, a Mercedes SL500, a Jaguar XKR and an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Or you've just had the good fortune to lose a relative whose memories of you were fonder than your memories of her. Either way, lucky you.
