Performance Audis have always been consistent in one key area: they are all ridiculously fast.
On the other burly Germanic hand, performance Audis have varied wildly in terms of driver engagement and fun. For every R8, there is a one-dimensional RS5; for every well-sorted RS6 there is an understeering RS3.
One Audi that ticks both of these boxes is the B7-generation RS4. It was fast, with a 414bhp, 4.2 Litre V8 that revved to 8000rpm and that was shared with the first iteration of the R8, and it was fun. It steered adroitly, engaged with its driver, and it wanted to play.
Due to being made from between 2005 and 2008, the RS4 also had a choice of a sweet open gate manual gearbox, or a still-in-its-infancy paddle shift torque converter.
The B7 RS4 has also aged very well. This is thanks to Audi’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary design language, which means their cars have aged very well. But the RS4 hasn’t just aged well because the B7 A4 was sensibly designed. As always with these things, the devil is in the details.
The B7’s go faster addendum looked, in-period, nothing short of demonic. From its jutting chin, complete with shark gill cut-outs in the front corners; to its widened front wheel arches; to its massive Audi RS oval-means-fast-ja exhaust tips. Now in this age of automotive brutalism the B7 RS4 looks remarkably restrained. It almost takes some basic-training car spotter skills to pick on out in modern traffic.
Now the design isn’t perfect. The rear end, disregarding the bazooka exhaust tips, is frightfully SEAT Exeo and is almost so devoid of design it hurts. But all of this can be forgiven thanks to someone at Audi-Sport fitting the B7 RS4 with proper holes-for-harnesses bucket seats. These seats are gorgeous. On the other hand, there is something disarmingly suspicious about bucket seats without harness holes; it shows hesitancy or un-needed self awareness that makes the whole exercise seems like a weak token gesture to ballsier performance cars.
Aside from Kerbsider’s obnoxious small-picture thinking, we have that V8. A 4.2 Litre TFSI piece of brilliance. It revved like no other Audi V8 before it, and the V8’s sharpness imbued the whole car with a sense of responsiveness. Somehow, a sharp engine sort of forcibly unionises all of the rest of the car’s responses into being just as sharp. Perhaps it’s all in your head, but if the engine is sharp enough to allow you to skim 100rpm off in third, in the middle of a tightening right hander, like skimming bubbles off a simmering chicken stock, then somehow the steering and brakes must possess the same dogged precision.
The B7 RS4’s relative lack of modern heft (the B7 weighs 1650kg) and a reasonable 414 of organic Germanic naturally aspirated horsepower give the whole car a sense of responsible indulgence. To be going fast in the B7, you have to be driving fast, so to say.
The best way of describing the RS4 in a wilfully incomplete manner is to say it is peachy. Just right in all ways, oh, and there was an estate version.
What a machine.
Kerbside 