From the outside, you can tell it’s not a normal Audi, but
only if you have a keen eye for detail. Even with its flat grey paint, it
doesn’t drag attention like any other car in its power range would. It looks
like a regular 4 door saloon, which it actually is but it looks harmless, calm,
and docile. It’s inconspicuous, but if you let it loose, it will bite your head
off.
Put it in comfort, everything is all gooey and soft, put it
to automatic and the car changes its characteristics with an educated guess
while assessing how you’re driving. You can also set it to individual and make
the settings yourself but if you don’t want to bother with any of that just
simply put it into Dynamic mode and awaken the 560 wild horses and the
acceleration is sickening, I mean truly sickening. 0-100kmph the RS7 devours it
in just 3.9 seconds and keeps going to 250kmph and to top it all off, is the
baritone from the archives of Beethoven’s symphonies through the exhaust. Apart
from the exhaust, there is the sound from the engine. Even though the 8 speed
ZF gearbox feels like it’s made out of lard and you never really feel the gear
changes, mostly because the transmission is just so good and partly because
Audi has directed the fuel injectors to drop a blob of fuel into the cylinders
every time a gear is changed and the result of that is a loud burp of fuel
being burnt. The blob of fuel is basically there to regain the power that is
lost in those milliseconds the car is busy changing gears to compensate and in
conjugation with its four wheel drive system from Quattro AG, the acceleration
will make you wish you didn’t have that full plate of butter chicken before you
set off. To our knowledge, there is probably no other car especially in its
segment that goes off the line quicker than this animal. While competitors
would be spinning their wheels and would be being stationary for quite a long
time, they would also be left like little dots in the Audi’s mirrors.
When you introduce the RS7 to some corners, it just sails
through with no drama at all thanks to the Quattro four wheel drive system.
This car isn’t meant to go sideways in; it’s serious German engineering with no
sense of humor. But usually four wheel drive cars tend to have a whiff of
understeer at high speed cornering; Audi has addressed that with torque
vectoring. So when you tell the car to turn right, what the traction control
does is, it uses its massive ceramic disc brakes harder on the wheels on the
right and sends more power to the wheels on the left, or when you turn left, it
would do the same to the wheels again to the other side. Acting like
centripetal force, torque vectoring allows to eliminate as much as understeer
as possible and the result is blisteringly fast. The limit of the RS7 is the
driver, as long as the driver knows what he is doing and his threshold to
G-forces determines how fast this car can actually go.