Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £78,300 to £78,300
Purposeful, modern appearance, convincing performance, excellent ride/handling balance.
Not quite as involving as it should be, poor visibility, lack of storage space.
Audi has scored a direct hit on the supercar establishment with its first shot. Not perfect, but exceptionally capable and very, very desirable.
For Audi this is anything but just another new car. Its importance extends far beyond even the significance of Audi competing in a corner of the market so distant from its traditional hunting grounds, it's a wonder it found the way. Despite the fact that, by Audi standards, very few R8s will be built, it is perhaps its single most significant car since the original Quattro in 1980.
This is the big step. This is Audi saying: 'From now on we're not content to battle it out with merely Mercedes and BMW. We're good enough to take on Porsche, Maserati and even Aston Martin. And here's the car that proves it.'
To gain some insight into what Audi is hoping to achieve here, consider that its two closest rivals are the £71,980 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S - the latest and one of the most lauded iterations of the world's most enduring sports car - and the £82,800 Aston V8 Vantage, a car with such looks and pedigree it could have had all the dynamic prowess of an overladen wheelie bin and still sold by the thousand. And you might fairly think that Audi going head-to-head with such sporting blue-bloods is akin to your neighbour's ginger tabby marching into a pit populated by Bengal Tigers and saying, 'Come on then, if you think you're hard enough.'
But Audi cannot be said to have come unprepared for this battle for, unlike many others in Audi's more populist ranges, the R8's looks don't write a cheque that the mechanicals underneath can't cash.
Its structure is a beautifully crafted aluminium spaceframe chassis, with forged aluminium suspension and all-aluminium body parts. As you might have guessed, Audi is big on aluminium. And it's right to be, because it knows that the secret to a successful small supercar is not just big power, but light weight. Counting against that is the provision of four-wheel drive, which Audi says improves the way the car drives: I'm inclined to see more as a marketing- than dynamics-led imperative.
And providing the whole with its forward thrust is the 420bhp, 4.2-litre V8 motor also found in the RS4 and modified only to provide dry sump lubrication, which not only keeps oil circulating the engine under very high g-loadings, but also allows the engine to be fitted as low as possible in the car.
